A lifelong friend and longtime student of domestic and international politics caught me off-guard recently with an observation I kicked myself for not having confronted before now. “It seems obvious,” he said, “that we are becoming, if we haven’t already become, a fascist state. The deeper question in my mind, though, is whether we are in danger of becoming a fascist nation.”

It was a profound observation that reflected his understanding of the important distinction between state, the political concept, and nation, the cultural concept. It also indicated that he grasped the unnerving similarities between current conditions in the United States and fascism, the extreme militaristic, nationalistic (or, to be more rigorous and precise, statist) authoritarianism-bordering-on-totalitarianism we in this country have always associated only with the vilest regimes abroad, like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia.

Americans for the most part make no distinction between state and nation. For reasons both semantic and intellectual, we tend to use these terms more or less interchangeably. We then further muddy the waters when we refer to ourself and others as countries, a geographical concept. We persist in claiming to be a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants, rarely with any appreciation of the underlying significance of the term. For us, the nation and the state have always been thought of as essentially coterminous, not least because of our long-standing sense of self as an E Pluribus Unum melting pot that assimilates our manifold diversities into a unified oneness of Americanism, unlike other countries where multiple nationalities exist within the same state and single nationalities cut across state boundaries.

A state has population, territory, and the capacity born of recognition by others to engage legitimately in relations with other actors, both states and non-states. The most important distinguishing feature of the state, though, is its governing apparatus, the authoritative machinery for imposing order, providing direction, allocating resources, meeting the needs of society, and interacting with the international community. This governing apparatus is what gives states what Max Weber famously proclaimed their ultimate defining feature: monopoly control of the legitimate use of force.

A nation, by contrast, is a people united by some galvanizing commonality of identity and belongingness – based on tradition, culture, language, sentiment, or aspiration – that provides unifying social glue. Although the nation lacks the externally derived sovereign legitimacy and standing of the state and the associated right to self-determination, it can lay claim to a more basic unifying emotional condition that reflects truly primal inner feelings and loyalties – who one identifies with, who one associates with, to whom one gives one’s loyalty; one’s people, in other words.

The Declaration of Independence – in stipulating that all men are created equal – and the Preamble to the Constitution – predicated on We the People – are expressions of the nation. The main body of the Constitution – establishing the institutions of government and specifying their powers – and its amendments are expressions of the state. Opinion polls, votes, and public demonstrations, similarly, give voice to the nation, while laws, executive orders, regulations, treaties, executive agreements, and other instrumentalities generated by government are reflections of the state. The state makes war; the nation wages war. The state conducts elections; the nation elects. The state manages resources; the nation produces and consumes resources.

Fascism is rule by strong man, all things being subordinated to his singular centrality, indispensability, and accretion of power. The strong man is the state; the state is the strong man. It stands in direct opposition to the pluralism of democracy, and it substitutes loyalty to the man for the freedom, equality, and individualism that democracy seeks to foster. State fascism, accordingly, seeks to strengthen the man at the expense of all else, and to undermine the institutions and values that represent or even smack of democracy – separation of powers, checks and balances, the rule of law, popular sovereignty, majoritarianism and minority protection, federalism, civil liberties, due process, and apolitical civil-military relations. Where these things break down, are hobbled, or marginalized, as they are in our country today, state fascism takes hold.

In a country such as ours, with a tradition of democracy, however imperfect or unfulfilled, a fascist nation would be an outgrowth – an unnatural outgrowth – of a fascist state. In a country such as Russia, on the other hand, where there has never been a bona fide tradition of democracy but instead a long history of imperial rule in different forms, a fascist nation is a natural complement to, and in fact an integral, embedded part of, the fascist state. In the United States, the emergence of a fascist nation would be a state of affairs in which The People, assuming they recognize their oneness, would essentially capitulate or cave in to the fascist state, accepting or declining to resist the newly normalized destruction of institutions and undermining of values they have previously subscribed to and held dear.

For a state on the verge of fascism, the question is this: What is America? Is it the land of the free and the home of the brave or a psychic prison of coercive fear, intimidation, and cowardly obedience to The Man? Is it a shining city on a hill that is a beacon of light for emulation by others or a political and ideological black hole of secrecy, deception, denial, and darkness (which, as The Washington Post has reminded us, is where democracy dies)? Is it a great power truly deserving of the title by virtue of the normative behavior it exhibits or simply an arrogant, hypocritical large country whose abundant resources give it self-anointed license to avoid accountability and responsibility?

For a nation at risk of becoming fascist, the question is this: What is an American? Is it a citizen committed to the ideas and ideals expressed by the country’s founders with regard to natural human rights and the associated obligations of government to secure and preserve those rights? Do those rights include the rights and duties to dissent and resist, to give one’s loyalty to the Constitution and the law over any individual, and to embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion? Or is an American one who defers uncritically and obediently to higher authority, censors oneself in the interest of good order, and prizes uniformity over diversity, deserved inequity over undeserved equity, and exclusion of unworthy Others whose dispossession and disenfranchisement are justified on grounds of their attributes and origins?

Those who have analyzed the collapse of regimes, states, and empires have cited an almost infinite array of underlying causes for such failures. So, it is perhaps fruitless to expend time trying to diagnose the unthinkable before it happens. One thing nonetheless seems clear: the nation that surrenders itself to fascism takes the fascism of the state to an entirely new level and thereby provides the single most important precursor for the conversion of authoritarianism to totalitarianism. Merely awakening ourselves to the possibility of such self-inflicted wounding hopefully will diminish the probability of death.

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