There's Always a Beginning

How and when fascist collapse starts.

Photo by Willian Justen de Vasconcellos on Unsplash

You don’t just wake up in a dystopian nightmare.

And yet, that’s how it usually happens in fiction. Whether it’s a movie, a book, or a television show, you’re just dropped right into the middle of it. Sometimes, the protagonist literally emerges from a coma.

For a long time, I wondered why.

Today, I figured it out.

First, an anecdote:

Almost ten years ago, during Trump 1.0, a full professor walked up to me after a conference presentation on the rhetoric of resistance. He told me I was worried about nothing. “America can afford to mess around.”

“Your ideas…” He smirked, then giggled.

“Sorry,” he said.

Today, I woke up to our president announcing that he considers an American celebrity “not in the best interests of our Great Country,” and he’s currently “giving serious consideration to taking away her citizenship.” She was born in the U.S., and so was her mom. Regardless of executive orders and court cases, this is what the president has always wanted—the ability to revoke someone’s citizenship because he personally deems them a threat to humanity.

The fact that he can even express this thought? It’s grounds for invoking the 25th Amendment and kicking him out. Over the last decade, we’ve rammed into several moments like this, but instead, the moderate middle always responds by calling them “feuds” and assuring us he’ll never actually do it.

People call it a distraction, but in a Trump administration, everything serves as a distraction from something else.

It’s all the main event.

All of it.

The Trump administration has already arrested students for expressing opinions they didn’t like, revoking whatever lawful status suits their agenda, and hitting them with inflated charges. It rammed a bill through Congress that approves $170 billion to hire thousands of new ICE agents while building “detention facilities” all over the country, enabling them to imprison 100,000 people “at any given time.” In short, it doubles their strength. The Director of Homeland Security is holding press conferences accusing the last administration of making climate disaster survivors trade sex for help, with no evidence whatsoever.

But this didn’t just happen.

There was a buildup.

It was a long road here, where a president openly threatens to revoke someone’s citizenship on social media, on a weekend, after ICE agents conduct a military sweep over a California park full of innocent kids, a transparent effort to intimidate and terrorize citizens into compliance.

They didn’t even try to justify it.

They simply described it as:

“A show of presence.”

The entire time, comfortable members of the middle class have reacted to every warning sign with smug advice. They’ve told us to calm down. They’ve told us we’re overreacting. They’ve accused us of fearmongering. They’ve told us things would work out, to keep calm and carry on.

Dystopian fiction often harnesses a literary technique called in medias res. They start you off in the middle of the collapse. Until recently, it seemed to make sense. That’s where the main action happens. They might give you some flashbacks. They might gesture toward the beginning of it all. They might walk you through the prelude in a couple of episodes, paced to keep everyone’s interest. But maybe there’s another reason the writers always open in the middle.

A possibility:

None of them can really figure out how you get from a somewhat stable, functional society to a dystopian nightmare. Even if they know, they don’t have the slightest clue how to make that interesting enough.

So they skip it.

A sociologist named Rahaf Harfoush recently introduced a term that speaks to all the other terms we have for glacial doom.

He calls it hypernormalization.

This term actually traces back to Russian historian Alexei Yurchak, who used it to describe the state of affairs in the Soviet Union, especially toward the end. Basically, everyone knew the system was broken—including the leaders. Nobody did anything about it because nobody knew how to fix it. Or at least, nobody knew how to fix it in a way that preserved their interests.

We have so many terms to describe this kind of paralysis. We have shifting baseline syndrome. We have systems justification theory. We have normalcy bias. We have Kanter’s Law. We have endless frameworks to theorize the attitude that seizes society when things go bad, but there’s something missing.

Just like dystopian fiction, nearly every batch of think pieces about our current dystopian nightmare forgets history. They don’t want to talk about the poor decisions that led us to the current instance of collapse.

They don’t want to discuss the misinformation about immunity debt that swept corporate news media in late 2022, paving the way for anti-vaxxers in public discourse. They don’t want to talk about the vast expansion of police power under previous administrations, or the rise of cop cities, or the mask bans, all of which precede this administration. They don’t want to talk about the systemic failures to hold members of the last Trump administration accountable.

They certainly don’t want to talk about all the hustle gurus who spent a decade praising Elon Musk as a polymath genius.

They also want to start in medias res.

When they start in the middle, they don’t have to acknowledge all the voices who spent ten years telling us not to worry.

For us, the beginning of collapse goes all the way back to 1776. Listen to people smarter than me, and you see it. There was never a time in this country when everyone was free. There was always a collapse going on for someone. The very origins of our country are rooted in the collapse of Native American culture and civilization. It’s rooted in slavery. Our founding fathers were the engineers of collapse. So, no wonder we’re living in it now. It was baked in.

This would be the beginning that nobody talks about. The America Trump wants to create has plenty of precedent in history, whether you talk about Slavery, Japanese Concentration Camps, The Gilded Age, or Native American Genocide. They’ve done it all before. But for a lot of people, it’s easier to start in the middle.

It’s easy to start there when you’re writing dystopian fiction. The writers can leave the beginning to our imagination. They can let us wonder what happened and how it got that bad. Maybe it’s more entertaining that way.

In real life, there’s always a beginning.

Always.