Fun with Fascism

Ten Easy Steps to Personal Self-Empowerment

Do you want authoritarian power? Do the words “executive privilege” give you a stiff erection? Then this article is written just for you. First of all, let’s take away the stigma of your fascist leanings, because in our uptight puritan society, a lot of people still get embarrassed by admitting that they think power is good and weakness is bad. “No, no, not me - I would never flirt with fascism,” they say awkwardly. “That stuff is for other people, naughty people who think bad thoughts,” they explain, their cheeks flushing shamefully as they fantasize about sex in the Oval Office. “I’m not here for the fascist tutorial, I’m just reading this article for the pictures.” Look, I’m not your Twitter feed: I don’t want to judge you for your political leanings any more than you want to judge me for my lingerie kink. I’m just here to teach you how to be the most effective authoritarian leader you can be, because it’s in everybody’s best interests for our future First Citizen to be able to exert power effectively while minimizing unnecessary bloodshed.

What are my credentials here? I haven’t collapsed any regimes yet, as far as you know. But then again, if I had, would I be writing this guide? Authoritarian leaders generally don’t have the time or the inclination to write instructional primers on how to repeat their successes, so it falls to amateur historians like me to spot the patterns in history and write these useful guides on how to personally empower yourself (or “seize power,” as the killjoys call it). So without further ado, let’s get into our list of instructions for you to take over your very own society!

1. Make Friends With Heavily Armed People (Build Your Army)

The reason this step is number one on your list is because it’s an obvious no-brainer. Look, at some point during your coup, some party poopers are going to notice that you’re trying to take over the country, and they’re going to express an objection to your plans. You’re going to object to the objection, and they’re going to object to you objecting to their objection, and the reality is that nobody is going to change the other side’s mind through persuasive argument or rational debate skills. You’re not going to suddenly hear a great argument from the other side and say “Oh wow, that’s a really persuasive point. When you put it that way, I guess maybe I don’t like power as much as I thought I did!” And they’re not going to hear your brilliant oratory and think “Oh my, I was worried that this guy was trying to subvert the democratic process, but now that he’s explained it like that I never realized how sexy subverting democracy could be.” At the end of the day, you and your opponents want fundamentally incompatible things, and while you still need to play to the crowd and keep up the public appearance of “debate,” you know and they know that at the end of the day, the “debate” is ultimately going to be settled by which team has more firepower. So make sure that’s your team. Listen to the concerns of your interest groups and constituencies who are traditionally very heavily armed, especially those with ties to the military and law enforcement. These people are in charge of maintaining law and order in your society, and without their backing, society literally collapses into anarchy. People have a tendency to romanticize living in anarchist societies but in reality, living in a state of anarchy sucks and the very first time somebody gets robbed and murdered on their way to work they’ll realize that. So make sure that you have enough armed people on your side that when push comes to shove, your followers can suppress anarchy and impose enough order that people feel safe under your regime.

2. Obtain Legitimacy (Be Popular)

People often talk about governments being “legitimate” or “illegitimate” but what is legitimacy, really? When you boil it down to its simplest essence, “legitimacy” means that the people who matter (typically the voters) perceive you as representing their interests better than anybody else. When people feel like their interests are being well-represented by you, they in turn are willing to act on your behalf, because intra-group cooperation is how humanity became the dominant species.

Typically legitimacy is gained by obtaining some elected position in government. But that isn’t the only way. As long as people trust you to speak for them and keep their well-being in mind while you are representing them, you have legitimacy. Legitimacy is important because no matter how tough you are, you can’t effectively govern a country if everybody hates you. You don’t need everybody to like you; that’s impossible and makes you appear weak. But you need a solid base of people who like you and trust you enough that they want to see you in power.

3. Muddy the Waters (False Flag Operations)

Let’s get real: when you take over the government, things are going to change around here. Hopefully this will be a change for the better, but I’m not your mom so I’m not trying to tell you how to live your life. The point is that regardless of where you fall on the alignment spectrum, transitioning from the existing government to a government where you are in charge is going to be a big change. People tend to get nervous about change, so your job is to reassure them that this will be a good change rather than a bad change.

One technique for convincing people that the change you bring is good rather than bad is to talk up all your great ideas while pointing out how much things currently suck under your enemies regime. Do things not suck yet? Don’t worry, you can make things suck very quickly just by creating a few fake identities online. Activist groups nowadays tend to be very stupid and have no vetting system to prevent anybody from infiltrating them and stirring shit up. (In fact, many activist groups are so primitive that they don’t even have any leadership at all to set policy and negotiate demands on the group’s behalf… which kind of begs the question of how they even expect to accomplish anything productive in the first place.) Don’t believe me? Just try an experiment: set up a fake BLM profile on Facebook and publicly do something stupid like declaring war on Christmas, saying it is a “colonialist institution” set up by “evil white racists.” Instead of disavowing you as a subversive provocateur who is trying to undermine them from within, most BLM groups will offer words of support and encouragement. This is how stupid most activist “organizations” have gotten in 2022. Directing them against your enemies is as simple and easy as point and click. If you can’t leverage incompetent activist groups to make things suck so that you can sweep in and offer to fix everything, then you really aren’t even trying.

4. Put Your Followers in Positions of Authority (Friends Have Each Other’s Backs)

I don’t know if this step even qualifies as a “plan” - as far as I’m concerned, this is just the honorable thing to do. Your followers had your back when you needed it, and so having their backs in return is just basic human decency. But if you really want to look at this from a purely pragmatic perspective, there’s a high probability that shit may hit the fan as you work on redistributing power from the people who have it to the people that don’t. And if shit does hit the fan, you’re going to want to make sure that the people in key positions of authority are loyal to you rather than to the powers that be. Money comes and goes, but power is measured in only two currencies: loyalty and knowledge. Surround yourself with people who have plenty of both, and your movement will take on a life of its own.

5. Create a Pretext to Suspend People’s Rights (The Big Whoopsie)

Whoopsie, something seriously bad happened! I don’t know what it was yet, but clearly the normal rules don’t apply in a wild and crazy situation like this. You need to temporarily suspend people’s rights until this whole mess gets sorted out. It’s also worth pointing out that you warned people beforehand how bad things would get and nobody listened to you, which is why this disaster is much worse than it would otherwise have been. Obviously you need emergency powers to deal with a situation like this.

Sometimes you’re lucky enough to have something seriously bad happen on its own (because let’s face it, a lot of people in government are not the sharpest knives in the drawer, and they often do mess things up pretty thoroughly without any third-party interference). Other times, you have to encourage bad things to happen. (See step 3 for more details.)

I’m not sure why, but a Big Whoopsie is almost always the key to convincing people that you are living in extraordinary times, and that extraordinary measures are called for in response. For example, in 1933 the Reichstag Fire was the Big Whoopsie that the Nazis needed to strip people’s rights away. In our modern day era the Covid pandemic could be considered a Big Whoopsie. In a galaxy far, far away, Senator Palpatine used the Separatist movement as his Big Whoopsie so that he could gain emergency powers from the Galactic Senate. It goes without saying that if you want to seize authoritarian power, you too will need a Big Whoopsie.

6. Lock Them Up (To Protect the People, Naturally)

Whether you call them quarantine camps or re-education centers, the point is that you need to stop the bad people from spreading their bad ideas to the good people. Things are pretty chaotic right now, thanks to that dratted Big Whoopsie, and in this volatile situation you don’t want your leadership to be threatened by people spreading Fake News and making your job more difficult than it already is. Remember, everything you’re doing is to protect the people, so anybody who tells lies about you is an Enemy of the People! That’s just common sense. Pretty hard to see how anybody could argue with that logic, unless they were the ones spreading Fake News. Lock them up: they’re clearly liars and traitors. You can let them out once you’ve successfully secured your power base and established your narrative as the dominant one.

7. Achieve Goals by Cutting Through Red Tape (Bureaucracy Sucks, but I Can Help)

In between kicking all the stupid assholes who dared to stand in your way and having spicy sex with kinky ladies who love power as much as you do, you should probably take some time out of your busy schedule to actually make things better for your constituency. After all, you did promise them that you’d improve their lives, and if you want their continued support, you need to live up to that promise. Fortunately, authoritarian leaders have one advantage that makes it really easy for them to solve problems: they are very good at cutting through bureaucratic red tape in a way that purely democratic leaders cannot.

The thing about democracies is that they have all sorts of checks and balances, which means that they tend to be very stable, but also have a hard time getting anything done. Authoritarian governments work the opposite way - they tend to be much more unstable, but they have the flexibility to react swiftly and effectively to unusual situations, because political strongmen are great at browbeating and intimidating federal bureaucrats into compliance. If you’re some pencil-pushing middle manager who slowly rose to power over twenty years by kissing the ass of the manager above you, the last thing you want to do is say “no” to the most powerful and popular person in your entire country, particularly when he starts making strongly worded hints about how his new initiative is in the best interests of the people, and only an Enemy of the People would want to undermine such a great program.

This means that as a populist authoritarian leader, you can push through positive and life-affirming social programs in a matter of weeks that might take years or even decades to push through under ordinary conditions. Exploit this to improve society and deliver on your campaign promises.

8. Manufacture Fake Opposition (The Illusion of Choice)

The most important part of being an authoritarian leader is to always deny that you are an authoritarian leader. This is why smart authoritarians never have fancy titles like Supreme Poomba or His Magnificent Eminence - instead it’s always some humble title like Secretary of the Interior or Prime Minister. Remember, you’re not doing this whole takeover thing for your own benefit, you’re doing it for the people. You’re a public servant, and servants are humble. So do your best to be as humble as possible.

Of course, no matter how good an actor you are, people might eventually notice and become a bit suspicious of the fact that you keep getting re-elected, and that your political party is the only one that ever wins elections. But that’s easy to solve. Just manufacture an argument with a trusted associate and have them start a political party to compete with you. How could they do this to you? Those filthy backstabbers!

Naturally the two of you are collaborating behind the scenes, staging and choreographing your rivalry the same way that the WWE coordinates their wrestling matches. (Wrestling fans, I am sorry to break it to you this way but the WWE matches are definitely rigged.) You each have complementary halves of the same agenda: when your political party is in power you advance your half of the agenda, and when the other political party takes power they advance their half. In public, however, you yell at each other and shake your fists angrily.

The end result is that any accusation that you are an authoritarian leader gets ridiculed. How can you possibly be an authoritarian when you have a rival party that consistently wins elections? Laugh the haters off and tell them that it sounds like conspiracy theory nonsense to you.

9. Mild Procedural Harassment (No Martyrs, Just Assholes)

You did it, you’re finally in power! Time to extract a brutal revenge on everybody who crossed you, right?

Wrong! That is not a good way to hold on to power. If you crack down on your enemies hard with a wave of executions or prison sentences, you’ll immediately be perceived as a tyrant and the people whom you executed will be innocent martyrs. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t take revenge on them. Revenge is great! I’m just saying that instead of doing something so vicious and over-the-top theatrically evil, it might be better to take revenge on your enemies by letting them live freely but slowly driving them insane over the years, one tiny step at a time. You do this by exercising police powers over them in a small but annoying way, constantly citing them for stupid things like “zoning violations,” or auditing them to ridiculous extremes. If anybody complains that this is cruel psychological torture by a ruthless authoritarian, publicly mock them for how ridiculous it sounds. “Hey, Phil doesn’t want to be constrained by mundane shit like ‘zoning ordinances’ or ‘taxes’ like everybody else, so I guess forcing him to obey the law like all of you makes me a ‘cruel authoritarian.’ When I tell Phil he can’t drive with a suspended license, I’m an evil dictator! Sorry to ‘oppress’ you like this, Phil! Please don’t report me to Amnesty International for that traffic ticket.” Keep periodically gaslighting them this way for the next twenty years. That way, instead of looking like heroes who are fighting a violent authoritarian regime, your opponents simply look like assholes who don’t want to obey the law and pay their taxes, and you seem both reasonable and fair for constantly making fun of them.

10. Consolidate Power (Rinse and Repeat.)

Now that you have successfully subverted democracy to your purposes, it’s time to do the same thing with the media. The process of institutional capture will vary depending on the institution as well as state and local laws. After you manage to get the media under your thumb, go for either academia or the major financial institutions.

Anyway, those are the ten steps to personally empowering yourself by having Fun with Fascism! I’m looking forwards to seeing your bold authoritarian moves out there in the real world. Stay safe, and don’t forget to design a snazzy uniform for your New World Order!

Edit: It goes without saying that this article is a joke, but it took me about two microseconds to realize that in the current political climate, this fact might need to be explicitly spelled out. So just to reiterate: this article is only a JOKE and I am not seriously advocating for a coup of the government. However, if you look at the world around you and notice some eerie similarities to the scenarios that I am describing in this article, perhaps it’s worth thinking about…