Fascist Hypnosis

Time to break it

I continue to be amazed by how many people in my extended networks, in comments on my posts, in other forums, among friends of my friends, seem to believe that Trump and Vance will be a better choice for the US than Harris and Walz. Or they think the entire system is so corrupt that the best thing they can do is abstain from voting altogether. Or they don’t even care. It is something like a collective hypnosis.

Many of the “spiritual” people I know seem to feel the whole thing is beneath them, perhaps due to the deep insights they have gotten sitting with “mother ayahuasca” with the indigenous people in the Amazon, or doing their 18th Vipassana, or whatever.

I also don’t want to keep focusing on the political spectacle. I don’t even like the mainstream Democrats very much. But at the moment, I feel we have no choice but to support them.

I find what is happening politically, socially, ecologically, and metaphysically to be intertwined. I am tired, increasingly infuriated, by all of the spiritual bypassing — the idea, so popular among many people in my extended communities, that we must overcome polarities, conflicts, political arguments, to reach some ineffable unified consciousness where we float serenely above it all. That is a wrong, lazy approach. We now see how it leads to the narcissistic RFK/Eisenstein/Russell Brand to Fascism train wreck.

Often, I find the people who feel so spiritually advanced they can disconnect have bank accounts in the seven figures or higher. Other people who think this way work in the “spiritual service industries” as meditation teachers, life couches, Ibiza tantrikas, sound healers, etcetera, where they support the .1% on their apolitical inner journey of never-ending healing.

As I write this, a new Category 5 hurricane, Milton, is about to smash into Florida, just a few days after Hurricane Helene utterly decimated North Carolina and Tennessee, causing $30 - 150 billions in damage. These increasing once-in-five-hundred-year, “Biblical” super-storms are intensifying in frequency and strength across the world. At this point, the intensification is happening annually, as direct result of the 40 billion metric tons of CO2 we put into the atmosphere each year.

While I don’t find either political party in the US to be amazing, one of them continues to deny, stridently, that humans are causing accelerated warming, all evidence to the contrary. Anthropogenic climate change is accepted by all but a handful of climate scientists, usually those (like Bjorn Lomberg with a $550,000 annual salary) who receive lavish subsidies from the fossil fuel industry. The other party at least accepts human-induced climate change is happening, and actually seeks to implement meaningful changes to deal with it, even if it isn’t enough.

This includes the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act. The IRA was passed in 2022. Since then, its clean energy and climate provisions have created more than 170,000 jobs. If it isn’t derailed by Trump, it will produce around 1.5 million additional jobs in renewables over the next decade. The law drives major investment in renewable energy, with over $110 billion in clean energy investments announced within the first year. With the IRA, the U.S. should add approximately 950 million megawatt-hours (MWh) of renewable energy by 2030; three times our current production from these sources.

Every Republican voted against the IRA. Trump and Vance intend to gut it, to, as Trump puts it, “drill, baby, drill.” Publicly, Donald Trump is skeptical about anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. He refers to climate change as a “hoax,” or a “scam.” When prodded in interviews, Trump says, “I don’t know that it’s man-made.” He continues to question whether human activity is the primary driver of climate change. Of course, we now know the directors of the main energy companies were well aware they were unleashing biospheric cataclysm decades ago. They chose to pursue disinformation and lobbying to protect their profits.

J.D. Vance also refuses to accept anthropogenic climate change. While he acknowledged in 2020 that "we, of course, have a climate problem" and supported cleaner energy alternatives like solar and electric vehicles as a venture capitalist, his views shifted recently. During his Senate campaign, Vance stated, “I’m skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man” and emphasized that the climate has been "changing for millennia.” During the debate he called the science around climate change, “weird.”

Vance gets substantial support from the fossil fuel industry. Since 2019, he has received over $340,000 in campaign contributions from oil and gas companies, among the highest amount of anyone in Congress. This backing from the industry miraculously coincides with his shift toward more blatant advocacy for fossil fuel interests. For example, Vance supports fracking in Ohio’s Utica Shale region. He introduced legislation to reverse clean energy incentives and prioritize fossil fuel-based because, he claims, it will lead to America’s “energy independence”. This is totally wrong, from any long-term perspective. Fossil fuels are non-renewable and become harder to extract. They release CO2 pollution that is making our planet uninhabitable.

I also feel the Democrats bear a lot of responsibility for the terrible situation we are in. The Democrats are symbiotically meshed with the Republicans. Having a duopoly where the other party is perceived as fanatic and extremist often serves the Democrats’ short-term political goals (until it doesn’t, and they lose). I feel annoyed I am being forced to play into that here. But once again, we are in a triage situation.

There are many issues where the Democrats could simply crush the Republicans. I find it stunning they don’t embrace these issues, due to the distorting influence of corporate money. If they did, the election would be a cakewalk.

For example, around 60-70% of the U.S. population supports universal health care. Most Americans favor expanding Medicare or a public option within the current healthcare system. About 82% of adults in the U.S. believe that the cost of prescription medications is unreasonable, and 75% want lower prescription drug prices. The Democrats could get behind many winning ideas, like breaking up the tech monopolies, to take another example.

Considering the high stakes (as I wrote last time, the Republicans seem ready to institute dictatorship, with Trump saying he intends to imprison his political opponents and Vance saying Republicans “have to get over their dictator phobia”), the Democrats are running an amazingly insipid campaign with an astounding lack of vision.

Because Biden has been President for the last four years, the Democrats are getting blamed for the skyrocketing price of food and other basic goods. Nobody hammers home that this is the direct result of climate change. The Republicans, above all, blocked essential, quite existential action on climate change for decades. That is why we find ourselves, now, in a very dire situation.

According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, overall food prices are about 22.43% higher in 2024 than they were in 2020. The price of flour is up 18% since 2020. Wheat production has been negatively impacted by droughts in the U.S. Midwest, while the Ukraine war has cut supplies.

The price of olive oil has skyrocketed due to extreme droughts in Southern Europe. In Spain, heatwaves and water shortages reduced olive yields, pushing prices to unprecedented levels, increasing nearly 25% in 2023 alone. Almond prices, too, are rising due to California's persistent drought, leading to higher costs as water becomes scarcer (almonds are a water-intense crop). The reductions in agricultural yields are happening everywhere, and quickly intensifying.

Climate change is the main reason for these rising costs. Warming exacerbates droughts, floods, and unpredictable weather. In England, yields of many crops have been severely reduced due to last season’s extreme flooding. Wheat production has dropped over 25% compared to last year. The milling wheat sector, essential for bread production, is down as much as 40%. Overall, the UK's agricultural output for key crops like wheat, barley, oats, and oilseed rape is 17.5% less. This fuels social instability and points to the potential for mass famine on the near horizon.

Basically, on every issue and every policy area, Republicans are catastrophic both for America and the world. As one example, Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord in 2017. This had significant global effects. We are the world's second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. We abandoned scientific consensus and undermined global efforts to combat climate change.

Our withdrawal stalled international cooperation on climate initiatives. It allowed climate skeptics and fossil fuel interests to push back against global regulations. The move emboldened countries with less stringent environmental policies, such as Brazil under President Jair Bolsonaro, to deprioritize climate action, potentially setting back years of diplomatic efforts to curb emissions. And people still want four more years of this kind of leadership?

My suggestion is we use the close-to-a-month we have left before the election to make a sustained outreach to confused, uncommitted people we know in our communities, particularly those who live in contested states. I recommend this excellent piece by Heather Cox Richardson. She writes:

Trump’s lies are not errors. They are part of a well-documented strategy to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to an authoritarian. 

Russian political theorists who were key to the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin after the collapse of the Soviet Union called this manipulation “political technology.”

They developed a series of techniques to pervert democracy through this virtual political reality. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split the opposition vote and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to further splinter the opposition, and, finally, created a false narrative around an election or other event that enabled them to control public debate.

Essentially, they perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out. 

But it has also worked in the United States, where right-wing leaders have used it to divide the American people and spread disinformation. While “misinformation” is simply false information—which we all spread innocently and correct with accurate information—“disinformation” is a deliberate lie to convince people of things that are not true. 

America is, as Paul Levy rightly notes, in the grip of a “collective psychosis” right now. We have a month or so left to try to break this trance. Let’s at least give it a shot.