Fascism Has Arrived in America. Will We Admit It?

Americans have long treated fascism as a foreign disease—something that happens in other countries, under other conditions, to other people. We comfort ourselves with the belief that our institutions are too strong, our Constitution too sacred, our intentions too good for it to take root here.

That belief is no longer defensible.

When agents of the state kill an American citizen and powerful political voices rush not to demand accountability but to justify the killing, something fundamental has broken. When due process is treated as an inconvenience, when state violence is excused as necessary, and when cruelty is reframed as strength, we are no longer arguing about policy. We are confronting authoritarianism.

This is how fascism arrives—not in one dramatic overthrow, but in the steady normalization of the unacceptable.

I am not writing this as a provocateur or a partisan. I am writing it as someone who has believed—deeply—in the quiet machinery of democracy: the idea that laws restrain power, that public servants answer to the people, and that citizenship carries obligations as well as rights.

I was raised to believe that when government acts, it must justify itself to the public, and that when it fails, accountability is not optional. Watching that expectation erode—watching fellow Americans rationalize what should horrify them—has been more chilling than any headline.

Fascism is not defined by aesthetics. It is defined by behavior. It is defined by the elevation of state power over individual rights, by the dehumanization of targeted groups, and by the insistence that force is justified so long as it is wielded against the “right” people. It is defined by loyalty tests, by contempt for oversight, and by the belief that some lives matter less than others.

Those conditions are now present in the United States.

We are watching the expansion of executive power paired with the erosion of accountability. We are watching law enforcement agencies treated not as servants of the law, but as instruments of political will. We are watching the deliberate dismantling of professional civil service in favor of personal loyalty. And we are watching a movement that openly celebrates these changes, so long as they hurt the people it despises.

This reality became impossible to deny when Immigration and Customs Enforcement killed an American citizen—and prominent voices within the MAGA movement moved swiftly to excuse, defend, or minimize that killing rather than demand transparency and consequences.

That response is the story.

The defense of state violence against citizens is a red line in any democracy. Crossing it does not make us safer. It makes us subjects.

We are told these are isolated incidents. That the victims are exceptions. That the system is working as intended. But when accountability disappears, exceptions become precedent. When violence is excused once, it becomes easier to excuse again. And when the state learns it can act without consequence, it will.

Some Americans insist this is simply the cost of “law and order.” But law without accountability is not order—it is power. And power without limits is the defining feature of authoritarian rule. History is unambiguous on this point.

Democracies die not when laws are broken, but when they are selectively enforced and selectively ignored.

What makes this moment especially dangerous is not that everyone agrees with what is happening. It is that too many people are learning to live with it.

Fascism does not require universal approval. It requires acquiescence. It relies on people who know something is wrong but convince themselves it is not their fight, not their issue, not their responsibility. It flourishes when outrage is replaced by exhaustion and when silence is mistaken for prudence.

The most corrosive lie being told right now is that resistance is pointless.

That lie is repeated every time someone shrugs and says, “This is just how things are now.” Every time outrage is mocked as naïve. Every time civic engagement is dismissed as futile. Cynicism is not realism. It is surrender.

Standing up to fascism does not require extremism; it requires refusing to normalize what should never be normal. It requires insisting that no agency is above the law, that no leader is beyond accountability, and that citizenship still means something more than compliance.

It requires speaking even when it is uncomfortable. Especially then.

The Constitution does not enforce itself. Rights do not defend themselves. Democracies do not survive on inertia. They survive because ordinary people decide that some lines cannot be crossed—and act accordingly.

Fascism has arrived in America not because we invited it, but because too many of us hoped it wasn’t really happening.

Hope is no longer enough.

If we want to remain a free people rather than a managed one, the time for passive concern has passed. What comes next depends on whether we choose to behave like citizens—or like spectators watching something terrible unfold, telling ourselves there is nothing to be done.

There is always something to be done.

The only question is whether we will do it.

The Opinionated Observer

Watching closely. Saying it plainly. Published Thursdays at 6:00 AM.