A lot of folks are worried about the U.S. “turning” fascist—no longer questioning if it will happen, but speculating on what it will look like. There’s this idea floating around that fascism is some shocking failure of the system, an accident, or an outside force creeping in. But if you dig into fascism’s roots, it’s clear that it’s not an anomaly; it’s colonialism turned inward. Fascism is just the state using the same strategies it has always used to control and dominate marginalized people, only now, those tactics will be aimed at a wider swath of the population.
The US is an interesting subject in this case, because it already maintains multiple colonies within its territory - like the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where me and my family live. The tools used against Indigenous nations like the Lakota to get us into these places - surveillance, land theft, forced assimilation, criminalization of culture - are the same ones that, under fascism, will turn inward to impose “order” on a larger scale. The tactics honed against the Lakota to get us into Prisoner of War Camp #334 (the original designation of Pine Ridge) are what you'll see applied under a fascist regime.
As Aimé Césaire put it, what the West “cannot forgive Hitler for…is the crime against the white man…that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved [for colonized peoples].” Fascism isn’t something foreign. It’s those same colonial “procedures,” just applied closer to home. And in the U.S., those procedures aren’t just present—they’re foundational to what this country is and how it was built. Surveillance, land grabs, forced submission—these are all baked into the DNA of America. That’s why so many Americans struggle to recognize fascism’s creeping return: they’ve been living with it all along. It’s the air, the background, the norm.
So if you’re wondering what American fascism will look like, start listening to Indigenous people, to Black and Brown communities who have faced these tactics for centuries - and continue to be the first targets.
Our past and present is the future fascism is bringing for settlers. While what folk experience won’t be identical to our colonization, it’s not far off. If folk want to know what might be coming, pay attention to the people who have been dealing with these systems of control and dispossession all along—because what’s being done to us is the fascist playbook.
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