This Isn’t the Fascism We Remember. That’s the Point.

Democracies rarely collapse in moments of chaos. They erode through adjustment—when abuses of power become familiar, expectations shrink, and accountability begins to feel optional.

This essay is part of the series Watching the Drift, which examines how democratic erosion takes hold through normalization and quiet accommodation.

When people hear the word fascism, they reach for familiar images: jackboots, mass rallies, suspended elections, newspapers shut down overnight. And when they don’t see those things—when the flag is still flying and the courts are still open—they conclude the alarm must be exaggerated.

That conclusion is comforting.

And it’s wrong.

Fascism does not require a single aesthetic. It does not arrive in identical uniforms across centuries and countries. It adapts to the systems it enters. And in the United States, it is not arriving as a carbon copy of 20th-century Europe, but as something more familiar—and therefore more dangerous.

What we are facing is a hybrid political system—authoritarian fascism adapted to American conditions—one that preserves the outward rituals of democracy while hollowing out its restraints.

Elections still occur. Courts still issue rulings. Laws are still written down. But the substance beneath those forms is being quietly altered. Power is concentrated. Accountability is selectively applied. Loyalty is rewarded, and dissent—while still nominally legal—is made increasingly difficult.

This is how authoritarian fascism survives in a country that believes it is immune to it: by using authoritarian methods without adopting authoritarian aesthetics.

I’m not using the word fascism loosely. I’m using it to describe a system with recognizable features: loyalty replacing law, power justified through grievance, harm normalized when directed at the “right” people, and democratic forms preserved long after democratic limits have been hollowed out. Those traits don’t require jackboots or suspended elections. They require accommodation.

It would be easier to describe what’s happening as authoritarianism. And in a narrow sense, that word captures part of the picture. Authoritarianism describes the tools being used—centralized power, selective enforcement, the erosion of accountability.

But tools are not systems.

What we are confronting is authoritarian fascism: a political system that fuses authoritarian control with personal loyalty, grievance-based identity, and the normalization of harm against designated enemies.

It preserves the appearance of democracy while emptying its restraints. It rewards submission, punishes dissent, and treats institutions not as limits on power but as tools to be captured, bent, or bypassed.

In other words, it does not abolish democracy.

It weaponizes it.

In older fascist systems, violence was centralized and explicit. The state did the intimidating. Authoritarian fascism in the United States often outsources intimidation instead—to online mobs, to armed “supporters,” to threats that hover just below official sanction. The effect is the same. People learn which opinions are safe to express, which investigations are worth pursuing, and which lines are better left uncrossed.

Propaganda no longer requires a ministry. Chaos does the work just as well. When information is fragmented, when truth is drowned in noise, when every fact can be dismissed as partisan, power doesn’t need to persuade. It only needs to exhaust.

Under authoritarian fascism, institutions aren’t abolished. They’re bent. Courts are delayed rather than defied. Laws are enforced unevenly. Bureaucracies are hollowed out and repopulated with loyalists. Competence becomes optional; obedience doesn't.

This is not a failure of imagination. It is a strategy shaped by the terrain of American democracy itself—federalism, decentralization, a fractured media environment, and a political culture that treats norms as disposable rather than binding.

And because the familiar structures remain, many people tell themselves nothing fundamental has changed.

That is the most dangerous illusion of all.

When people refuse to name fascism, the system gets to operate without being recognized. Opponents stay fragmented. Every abuse becomes a “new controversy” instead of part of a pattern. Accountability is endlessly deferred.

Meanwhile, fascist movements do not fear language. They weaponize it.

The result is an asymmetry that grows over time. One side polices itself into silence. The other side exploits that restraint.

That isn’t caution.

It’s vulnerability.

And tiptoeing around the problem doesn’t help us address it—let alone fix it. We’ve avoided this word for years out of fear: fear of offending, fear of overreach, fear of “diluting” its power. But language doesn’t lose power by being used carefully and accurately. It loses power when it’s treated as too dangerous to say aloud—and the system it describes gains power as a result.

By refusing to name fascism, we don’t weaken it. We give it room to operate. We give it room to grow.

Authoritarian fascism does not depend on universal belief. It depends on accommodation—on enough people inside the system deciding that the cost of resistance is higher than the cost of silence.

That calculation is already being made.

It is made every time an abuse of power is excused as norm-breaking rather than norm-destroying. Every time loyalty is framed as pragmatism. Every time an institution chooses delay over defense and calls it restraint.

What makes this moment uniquely perilous is not that the threat is unprecedented, but that it is familiar enough to be tolerated. The machinery of democracy still hums, even as its guardrails are weakened.

And because nothing collapses all at once, people convince themselves collapse isn’t happening at all.

But systems do not fail in a single dramatic moment. They fail when those entrusted with their protection decide that survival, careers, or political advantage matter more than the rules that give their authority legitimacy in the first place.

At some point, democratic institutions stop being self-sustaining under authoritarian fascism. They begin to rely on the people inside them choosing whether they still mean what they say.

Because once this kind of system takes root, its most powerful ally is not force—but familiarity.

That moment does not announce itself.

It simply arrives—and waits to see who will act.

----Alert: Given major developments with federal immigration enforcement this week, I’ll be publishing a special edition this Friday that examines how these events fit into the framework I outlined today.

The Opinionated Observer

Watching closely. Saying it plainly.

Published Thursdays at 6:00 AM.

If this resonated with you, you might want to read:

Who Does the Government Serve When Citizens Stop Demanding Better?

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