Fascism as a Form of Self-Hatred

People aren't voting against their self-interest; their self-interest is death.

When I see Elon Musk do a Nazi salute; when I see him and the Trump administration ransack the government; when I see Trump suggest that we ethnically cleanse Gaza and replace it with condos, I see a country increasingly obsessed with death.

The U.S. has always been a country and a culture based in violence. How could a nation founded on genocide and slavery not be? During eras of liberal regimes that focus on death is perhaps a bit softened, but it is always there—in people’s obsession with firearms, in our endless bipartisan support for war, in our insistence that “freedom” means the right to die with thousands of dollars of medical debt, as long as we’re allowed to drive cars as big as we wish.

Now, under the second Trump presidency, that violence has been ratcheted up several levels. But, I think, it’s also changed focus, or expanded focus.

Plenty of people have written about the desires of right-wingers to kill others—to use trans people as gristmill for their fascist machine; to support the destruction of entire populations as long as it benefits whiteness and patriarchy. That’s how fascism always works, right? Identifying an “other” to focus all your repression and hatred onto, and believing that their destruction will lead to your liberation.

But I’d like to propose something different is happening now—that the imperialist psychic violence of the American project has been turned inward; that people, across race and class, want to enact the psychic violence of fascism on themselves.

The current and widespread support for our new overlords is not a sign of a continuance of the tried-and-true American project of externalized violence for selfish gain, but a new era of internalized violence for purposeful (though subconscious) self-destruction. To put it plainly: people are becoming more inclined toward fascism not only because they want to kill others, but because they want to kill themselves.

Statistically, we are increasingly a nation careening toward death. The number of deaths from drug overdoses in the United States rose by 400 percent between 2003 and 2023. Deaths from alcoholism have been rapidly rising too. Suicides have been steadily rising since the early 2000s as well. This drive toward self-annihilation is increasing in less obvious ways too: people desiring to drive larger and more dangerous cars despite traffic fatalities increasing year-over-year; people refusing to wear masks at the height of the pandemic despite knowing it put them at a much greater risk for death.

Interestingly, white people, and especially white men, seem to be uniquely drawn to these “deaths of despair.” This is the same demographic we associate with voting against their own self-interest by voting for people like Trump. Which, to me, brings up an interesting question: are the people voting to have their own lives further ruined doing so against their own self-interest, or is their interest in having their lives ruined?