Fascism in 2025 America: A Warning and Call to Action
Untitled. By Robert Frank, via blind magazine
The specter of fascism returns
“Remember who the real enemy is.” — The Hunger Games
Fiction has never struggled to name tyranny. We root for Katniss against the Capitol, for the Rebellion against the Galactic Empire, for Dumbledore’s Army against Voldemort’s regime. Ultranationalism and mythic populism are no longer just plot devices. In 2025 America, our drift toward authoritarianism is a political reality, and the courage we cheer in our favorite stories feels conspicuously absent on our own streets.
The word fascism is no longer a relic belonging to the past tense of history books; it is no longer something that happens “over there.” It has become a present and urgent threat. Across U.S. politics, civic institutions, and public discourse, we see signs of power consolidation, intensifying propaganda, and polarization so severe that it threatens the very possibility of a united nation. Confronting this moment requires clarity about how fascism manifests today, and honesty about how it mutates. It also requires action: cultivating habits of resistance, asking sharper questions, and taking daily steps, however small, to preserve democracy as a living practice.
Below, I will examine how propaganda, language, and structural violence serve as accelerants, propelling democratic erosion forward under the guise of common sense or national security. And finally, I will turn it back to us: what questions do we need to ask ourselves, and what everyday practices can we adopt to resist the drift and keep democracy alive?
What is fascism (and how does it mutate)?
To understand fascism in the modern era, we have to think beyond the simplistic paradigm of a resurrected 1930s Mussolini or Hitler, but rather consider a shifting set of tendencies: ultranationalism, mythic populism, the merger of corporate and state power, anti-pluralism, and the instrumentalization of violence or the threat thereof. Some useful definitions:
Political scientist Robert Paxton defines fascism as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with decline, humiliation, or victimhood; a call for a rebirth; and a cult of unity, leader, and purity.
Others emphasize fascism’s reliance on propaganda, cultic followings, scapegoating of internal “others,” and efforts to dismantle liberal checks and institutions.
In the U.S., fascist tendencies have long roots in white supremacy, nativism, and organized political violence (e.g., the KKK, early 20th-century proto-fascist groups).
What matters isn’t whether America is “fully fascist” (a binary judgment), but that we can observe a sliding scale of authoritarian drift. In 2025, some of the dynamics we must watch are:
Centralization of executive power: sweeping orders, redefining terms like “terrorism,” bypassing oversight.
Militarization of internal politics: Use of federal troops domestically (“full force, if necessary”) to quell protests or assert authority.
Propaganda, media capture, and narrative control: Recasting language (e.g. labeling critics as “terrorists,” “threats,” or “enemies”), delegitimizing independent media or universities, declaring certain voices “ungrievable.”
Appeals to fear, crisis, and existential threat: weaponizing crises (real or manufactured) to justify emergency measures or restrictions.
Cultural and symbolic gestures: parades, pageantry, cult of personality, performative displays (which can signal strength, control, belonging).
The paradox of pop culture courage vs. real-world silence
There’s a deep irony here. Rising up against authoritarian regimes is a theme that dominates our cultural imagination. Millions of Americans cosplay as rebels, quote the slogans, and romanticize the courage of resistance in galaxies far, far away. Yet when oppression unfolds in our own world—whether in America’s own democratic backslide, or in the devastation of Palestinians under occupation, starvation, and bombardment—many of those same voices fall quiet. The moral clarity that feels so obvious in our fictional heroes becomes suddenly muddled, deferred, or avoided in a reality where so many find themselves siding with the villains of our own story.
This dissonance is itself a form of propaganda at work: we are trained to channel our rage and solidarity into safe, consumable narratives, while being cautioned that real-world solidarity is “too political,” “too divisive,” or “dangerous.” Fascism thrives in that gap between what we claim to admire in our stories and what we fail to act on in our politics.
Propaganda, violence, and symbolic regimes: how authoritarian drift works
Propaganda doesn’t always look like the heavy-handed broadcasts of past dictatorships. In liberal democracies, it’s often subtle, institutionalized, and woven into the everyday flow of information. Rather than banishing dissent outright, democracies filter discourse through curated media channels, algorithmic amplification, and selective silencing. What reaches us is not necessarily false, but partial, a story shaped as much by omission as by what is said aloud.
Propaganda rarely succeeds by lying alone. It thrives on reframing issues, shifting language, striking emotional chords, and repeating ideas until they feel like common sense. Its real power lies in bypassing reason and appealing instead to identity and fear. The digital age has only intensified these tendencies. Social media bots, algorithmic filter bubbles, AI-generated content, and precision microtargeting make it easy to manufacture the illusion of consensus. We scroll and see the same frames echoed back, unaware of how carefully they are being curated.
There are tools to combat this, including fact-checking initiatives, algorithmic adjustments, and counter-messaging campaigns, but they often struggle to keep pace with the speed and scale of disinformation. The result is an uneven battle: a flood of distortion met with scattered, fragile defenses.
Violence, then, is not only physical, it is also linguistic, structural, and bureaucratic. The rhetorical forms of cruelty, exclusion, and demonization are among fascism’s main instruments. Kafka, Arendt, Butler, and Zizek all offer ways of seeing how violence operates beneath the obvious.
Hannah Arendt reminds us that power and violence are not the same thing; in fact, they are opposites. Power rests on consent and collective legitimacy, while violence depends on force; it can interrupt power, but it cannot sustain it. Judith Butler extends this by showing how violence denies the grievability of certain lives, making some deaths mournable and others invisible, a hierarchy that undergirds systems of domination.
The debate over political violence is long and contested: Fanon saw it as a necessary rupture against colonial order, while figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Butler argued that violence, even if momentarily effective, ultimately reproduces the very logic it seeks to dismantle. Resisting fascism, then, is not simply about suppressing violent outbursts but about rebuilding the conditions for genuine power, shared norms, public life, contestation, care, and pluralism.
Key questions for our moment
To act consciously, we each need to cultivate habits of critical thinking and questioning. Below are guiding questions, not the “right” answers, but ongoing probes you can carry with you.
What stories are being erased? Which histories, perspectives, or lived experiences are deliberately left out of the narrative? Erasure can happen through silence, selective memory, or rewriting events to center dominant voices. Ask: who gets remembered, who gets forgotten, and who benefits from that forgetting?
How is language being shifted or weaponized? Language shapes what we see as possible or legitimate. Words can be softened to mask harm (“collateral damage”), or hardened to stigmatize dissent (“radical,” “unpatriotic”). Watch for euphemisms, redefinitions, and rhetorical sleights of hand that distort reality and reframe power.
Where is dissent being squeezed or caricatured? Is criticism being painted as chaos? Are protestors reduced to stereotypes instead of being heard? Systems often neutralize opposition by trivializing it, punishing it, or branding it as illegitimate. Notice where space for dissent is shrinking, and how those in power frame those who resist.
What is the emotional infrastructure? Meaning the scaffolding of emotions that societies build and lean on, like fear, hope, outrage, apathy, belonging, etc. (sometimes referred to as affective infrastructure). Emotional climates are cultivated, sometimes manufactured, to hold systems in place; fear to control, hope to mobilize, cynicism to suppress, joy to sustain.
What systems of accountability remain? What institutions, norms, or communities can still check power? Courts, media, unions, local councils, even informal networks can act as guardrails. When these are weakened, co-opted, or hollowed out, accountability doesn’t vanish; it mutates. Who still has the leverage to call leaders to account?
What illusions of inevitability are being fed? Power often thrives on the story that “things have always been this way, and always will be.” The myth of inevitability discourages action by making change feel impossible. Where are you hearing inevitability? Who is invested in you believing that resistance is futile?
Micro-actions: what we can do daily
Resisting fascism involves more than grand gestures; it’s often the small, repeated choices that matter most. In our media habits, it looks like pausing before we share and deliberately subscribing to independent outlets that broaden our perspective and slow the spread of propaganda. In conversation, it means asking “why now?” when outrage goes viral, and refusing the easy binaries that flatten nuance.
Within our communities, it’s about strengthening the institutions that hold democracy together—supporting local media, civil liberties groups, and education. Public action can take the form of nonviolent protest by simply reclaiming the cultural spaces that authoritarianism tries to dominate. And, just as importantly, sustaining the fight requires personal practices: resting, cultivating joy, and building solidarity across lines of difference. Each act may feel small on its own, but together they weave the fabric of democratic resilience.
A concluding provocation: violence, hope, power
Violence is seductive. While it may feel like a decisive rupture in the moment, it often begets cycles of domination. Hannah Arendt was right to warn that political power born of sheer force is brittle; it burns bright, then collapses in on itself. And yet, to say “violence always begets violence” is too simple. History reminds us that there are moments when sacred rage, when a moral and ethical form of violence, has been necessary to meet the original violence of oppression. Fanon called it a cleansing force, a break with the colonizer’s chokehold; enslaved people who revolted knew this truth in their bones. At times, it is the eruption of rage, not polite appeals, that forces open space for dialogue and bridge-building that would otherwise never come.
The challenge, then, is not to deny violence’s place in history, but to refuse to let it be the final word. Our work is to reassert dialogue, empathy, plurality, and deliberation as powerful and necessary tools. It is imperative that we build structures of meaning and solidarity that can hold after the fire passes, but also understand that the fire must come in order to pass. To reclaim democracy is to insist not only on informed citizens, but on practicing citizens. We must empower people not simply to vote, but to read, question, resist, and build.
We ultimately achieve victory through building bridges, not burning them, even if we sometimes have to set small fires to clear the ground where those bridges can stand. And, most urgently, we must find the courage to emulate our fictional heroes and join the resistance. The “Empire” has become a reality beyond the worlds of our imagination. We cannot let it win.