U.S. Fascism - Conclusion
How Will It End?
U.S. fascism is the military-industrial complex, the nationalist bundling of government authority and big business. Chapter One traced this structure’s establishment and growth. Chapter Two chronicled its expansion after the attacks of 9-11. Chapter Three explained how the military boosted industry during the COVID-19 pandemic. Chapter Four showed the structure’s belligerence during that pandemic. Chapter Five laid out the structure’s response to unprecedented civil unrest, and Chapter Six described how U.S. fascism now views the public at large.
The structure’s widespread lies—including but not limited to official government propaganda, industry media operations, and the two in tandem—prevent the U.S. public from understanding the main ways in which the military-industrial complex harms the country, including:
The over one trillion dollars funneled each year toward militarism and war could instead go toward helping the public. It could be invested in education, infrastructure, healthcare, local food production, affordable housing, international scientific cooperation, debt relief, and other beneficial endeavors.
The military-industrial complex comes before the wars, not in response to them. Wars are the sustenance of the complex. The poor and working class fight the wars; the ruling class profits from the wars.
The military-industrial complex’s massive espionage apparatus (known widely as the surveillance state) spies on the public.
The military-industrial complex’s pollution poisons the air, water, and soil.
Despite all, the popular struggle (fighting for labor rights, civil rights, genuine democracy, and an end to war and war profiteering) rises again and again. The body politic—from the advent of socialism, through the turbulent sixties, through Occupy and black life, through COVID-19 and the summer 2020 protests—screams for freedom.
In the United States today, the working class is crushed beneath immense overlapping problems: no universal healthcare; no job security; costly higher education and mammoth student debt; food deserts in cities; pollution in the form of particulates, nuclear waste, industrial runoff and dumping, microplastics, and contaminated soil; unpotable water; a changing climate and massive biodiversity loss; a consumer culture imposed from above; crumbling public infrastructure, including public transit; incessant persecution of Arabs, black people, Asians, and other ethnicities; hundreds of thousands of homeless; millions of children going to bed hungry every night; a paltry social safety net; and the financial industry commodifying human needs, including water, housing, and food.
The tradeoffs are real. A small portion of the money that the U.S. government allocated to the post-9-11 wars could have sent every young person in the U.S. to college.1
And preventing the next pandemic will cost $22.2 billion, scientists say. The Pentagon on average shovels that kind of money toward war corporations in less than three weeks, I calculated based on 2022 budgets and contracting announcements.
As I edited this section on 19 August 2022, the U.S. government issued five $975 million contracts for research into new military aircraft propulsion. What could your town or state do with that kind of money?
The U.S. working class allows the ruling class to make these harmful decisions every single day. The U.S. working class allows the ruling class to keep the country at war.
Genuine “national security” is cooperation for the sake of the natural world, including improvement of the human condition.
One with faith in the system might say that ridding ourselves of fascism requires disassembling the fascist structure legislatively. This would start with revoking its foundational legislation (the 1947 National Security Act and Labor Management Relations Act), all subsequent “national security” legislation, including the aggressive policies passed each year in the National Defense Authorization Act, and the Supreme Court rulings that have given corporations incredible authority to influence policy. Ridding ourselves of fascism legislatively would require the imprisonment and eventual rehabilitation of current and former top war criminals, war profiteers, and their premier congressional and White House abettors. It would require passing a constitutional amendment banning war profiteering and immediately signing and ratifying the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). It would require the dissolution of numerous intelligence agencies, the outlawing of covert action, and the redirection of the military-industrial complex’s technology and brain power toward care of the natural world, including humanity. Meanwhile, many military bases and vast training ranges would become off-limits to humans, allowing the natural world to rebound. Ridding ourselves of fascism legislatively would require transferring Defense’s budget into other departments, as well as into a fund for the peoples of the world who have been on the receiving end of the wars. Those would be the first legislative steps.
There is one problem: Under U.S. fascism, legislation aids—not hinders—militarism and oppression. What does that mean? That means it is up to local organizing—workers united across racial lines—to take the lead in determining the fate of the species.
The U.S. ruling class will try to continue the business-as-usual approach that has served it so well during wars, proxy and direct, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the regular protests. Additional stressors coming down the pike (e.g., water scarcity, internally displaced persons, crop failure, further collapse of ecosystems, capitalists keeping prices high on necessities) will intensify the rallying hive of local organizing and the fascist state’s brutality.
If the species does not rid itself of the fascist structure, we risk losing everything—art, architecture, and mathematics; literacy (computer, linguistic, scientific); connectivity; and modern medicine—in the very real, overlapping climate crisis and sixth mass extinction.
Over two decades (2001-2021), the U.S. government chose to spend $21 trillion on militarization, per Lindsay Koshgarian, Ashik Siddique, and Lorah Steichen, “State of Insecurity: The Cost of Militarization Since 9/11” (pdf). The National Priorities Project, an IPS initiative, estimated that $16 trillion went to the military and wars, $949 billion to DHS, and $732 billion to federal law enforcement. $3 trillion to veterans' programs. (The best way to help veterans is to bring the troops home and care for them. Stop creating veterans.) $740 billion could pay for 19,790,000 scholarships for university students for 4 years.