Our Negotiation with Fascism

Morning Comrades.

The essay I originally intended to write today was another attempt to connect the latest wave of anti-communist hysteria emerging from the United States with the legal and material architecture that has been patiently assembled since the beginning of the so-called War on Terror; to examine how the language has shifted from “Islamic extremism” to “domestic extremism”, from there to “misinformation”, “anti-government radicalisation”, “violent conspiracy theories”, “foreign influence”, “anti-institutional actors”, and now increasingly towards the vague and wonderfully elastic category of those whose politics are deemed hostile to technological progress itself, a category so conveniently undefined that it can eventually contain almost anyone. That may still happen but as it sits, this Sunday afternoon, a little self reflection, which, please, do not mistake for defeatism, I am far too stubborn to ever fall into that self-pitying nonsense, but we do, regularly have to look in the mirror and ask what it is we are doing.

For more than twenty years I have written about the mechanics of the authoritarian turn in the West, about the slow and methodical construction of a political order that increasingly resembles the very systems it claims to have defeated, and although I never expected an article, a lecture, an artwork or an essay to produce an immediate reversal of history, I nevertheless assumed that the accumulation of evidence would eventually force a corresponding accumulation of political will. Not just my own, but everyones, there are too many to name.

That assumption now appears almost embarrassingly naïve, not because the analysis was incorrect, but because it misunderstood the nature of the obstacle. The obstacle was never ignorance, it was never the absence of information and it was never that people simply did not know what was happening. Rather, it was the infinitely more depressing reality that people knew perfectly well, recognised fragments of the same process unfolding around them, discussed it over dinner, reposted articles, attended meetings, occasionally marched through city centres carrying slogans whose meanings they themselves increasingly struggled to believe, before returning home to negotiate once again with the small comforts that the very system they opposed continued to provide. This does also include me, to be entirely clear here.

Twenty years is a long time to shout into a canyon and catalogue the echo. Long enough to watch the same warnings age from prophecy into obituary, long enough to have written the mechanics of the thing so many times that the sentences start to feel like liturgy rather than analysis, the creeping juridical infrastructure, the manufactured enemies within, the slow bureaucratic capture of institutions that were meant, however feebly, to hold power to account. You write it down because writing it down is what you do with dread when you refuse to let it curdle into paralysis.

And then one day you sit to write yet another essay, as originally intended tonight, the bipartisan choreography of legislation and surveillance apparatus that always arrives dressed as security and leaves as permanent architecture, and somewhere in the drafting the essay stops being about them and starts being about us, because the material we are cataloguing isn’t new. It has never been new. It has simply been getting closer, the way weather gets closer, the way a fever gets closer to the bone.

Here is the thing nobody wants said plainly at the dinner party: this was never a knowledge problem. The West has not been sleepwalking into authoritarianism for want of an alarm clock, and even before the advent of the internet, a time I somewhat remember, mostly due to the excesses of that time, there were many, loud alarm clocks, people like us, shouting from the rooftops, stages, printing in posters and pamphlets.

The alarms have been going off since before most of the people currently sounding them were born, dissidents, historians, exiled theorists, the whole tired lineage of people who read all the relevant works not as period furniture but as a maintenance manual, have been describing this machine in exhaustive, foot-noted, peer-reviewed, and utterly ignored detail. Every mechanism has been named. Every legal ratchet, every media capture, every militarised police procurement contract, every “temporary” emergency power that calcified into permanent statute, named, dated, cross-referenced, published. Still the machine runs, well-oiled, bipartisan, humming along under both rosettes because its function was never partisan to begin with; it is simply the shape state power takes when it is allowed to solidify without resistance, regardless of which manager happens to be holding the clipboard that week.

So if it isn’t ignorance, what is it? It is negotiation. Not treaty-table negotiation, nothing so seemingly dignified, but the low, continuous, half-conscious negotiation each of us runs daily with our own comfort. We know, in the way one knows a diagnosis one has decided not to look up, that the infrastructure being built is not defensive but offensive, that its target list simply hasn’t reached us yet, that the machinery of exception always begins its life pointed at somebody easy to sacrifice and only later swings, indifferent as a gun turret, toward the rest. Still the negotiation holds, because the rent is due, because the children need collecting, because outrage is exhausting and the algorithm has already prepared tomorrow’s outrage to replace today’s, and because, here is the ugly, private truth beneath all the public despair, most of us have quietly priced in a version of fascism we believe we can personally survive. That is the transaction. Not blindness. A bet. A bet that the knock will come for the other name on the list first, and that by the time it doesn’t, something, somehow, will have changed. I know it sounds harsh and again I am looking at myself more than anyone else here. I am almost 50, the arrests and subsequent criminal records resulting from my politics and short temper are enough already to disqualify myself from a “dignified” older age, and my fucking knees hurt.

This is where the philosophical rot sits, deeper than any particular policy: modern subjectivity has been engineered, not accidentally, but as a governing technology, to metabolise catastrophe as content. We have been trained since childhood to be spectators of our own historical moment, to receive the dismantling of the polity the way we receive weather reports, with concern that expires at the edge of the screen. The citizen has been dissolved into the consumer, and the consumer’s only political act, most days, is choosing which mood to purchase: outrage, irony, resignation, all available, all monetised, all functionally identical in that none of them require you to leave the room. The American Dream ( and yes, no one even my age ever believed in that nonsense but here we are ) has curdled into a con so total that even the con artists no longer believe in it, but they perform its motions for the cameras and the sequel to that observation is that the audience learned to do the same thing to their own conscience, perform alarm, perform resistance, in the exact posture required to avoid the discomfort of actually resisting.

The state, for its part, does not need everyone and is increasingly making it clearer that they require less and less of us. It only needs enough of us managed, enough of us comfortable enough, enough of us convinced that the emergency is rhetorical rather than architectural, right up until the architecture is finished and rhetoric becomes redundant. That is the real bipartisan project, not this or that piece of legislation, but the decades-long construction of a public too comfortable, too tired, too atomised to constitute a threat to whoever eventually holds the finished machine. Every crisis is a groundworks excavation; every “unprecedented measure” a support beam nobody plans to remove. The material infrastructure, the surveillance contracts, the militarised police departments, the detention capacity quietly overbuilt for populations that do not yet exist, waits, patient as concrete, for the legal infrastructure to catch up and legitimise its use. And it always catches up. It has never once failed to catch up.

None of this is a failure of information. It is a failure of nerve dressed up, generation after generation, as a failure of information, because the second diagnosis is bearable and the first is not. To admit that we know, and have known, and have simply chosen the daily comfort of not acting on what we know, is to admit that the machine isn’t being built despite us. It is being built with our permission, renewed every morning we decide today is not the day, in exchange for one more ordinary, undisturbed evening of performative role play that only some of the most sadistic fucks out there could enjoy. Twenty years of writing the mechanics down has taught me this much, at least: the essay was never the intervention. The essay was the receipt.

It lies in the endless negotiation with comfort, in the quiet hope that someone else will eventually pay the price that history always demands whilst allowing us to retain the conveniences through which that history reproduces itself. We negotiate with our phones, our careers, our mortgages, our reputations, our social standing and our fear of becoming inconvenient. We negotiate until negotiation itself becomes indistinguishable from surrender. We mistake the preservation of our immediate stability for political strategy, when in reality it is often nothing more than the gradual adaptation of free people to increasingly unfree conditions.

Perhaps that is the thought that has haunted me more than any legislative development or security doctrine ever could. Not that authoritarianism continues to expand, because history offers countless examples of power seeking its own perpetuation, but that we have become extraordinarily skilled at witnessing it whilst reassuring ourselves that we remain opposed to it. We continue to recognise the architecture even as we furnish its rooms, and somewhere between recognition and refusal we have built an entire culture devoted to the management of cognitive dissonance, a civilisation whose defining political gesture is no longer resistance but negotiation, forever bargaining with tyranny in the desperate hope that it will allow us to keep the coffee machine, the broadband connection and our weekends, until eventually we discover that what we surrendered was never simply comfort, but the very capacity to imagine freedom outside the terms established by those who had been constructing its disappearance in broad daylight all along.

A reckoning is due.

Yours, angrily,

V.