I want you to imagine that you are a political actor with designs on running a fascist dictatorship.
The first thing that you will need to do is start a political party. You might like to recruit your friends in business that you have cultivated. They will likely want to help you because facism involves an enmeshing of business and government for private profits. They will likely enjoy the idea of passing legislation on behalf of them because the golden rule is in play - whoever has the gold makes the rules - and who better to make the rules than those people who already have the gold.
If you don't want to start your own political party, then you might like to join a party which calls itself 'conservative'. The term is vague and there will be probably be factions who believe in the institutions of the state but they can be easily swung to a new standpoint. You will still need the security and judicial parts of the state apparatus to successfully enforce power. Conservatives can be converted to nationalists and nativists relatively easily.
You will need to eject some members of your party on the grounds that they are racist, sexist, or other kind of 'ist'. It isn't necessary that your party cleanse itself of these elements; merely that you have some 'other' who can become a lightning rod for your scorn. You can actively demonise these people in the press and they will actually be willing to accept the derision because of the notoriety that they will get. They can have opinions which are absolutely unacceptable and there will always be people who will follow them because they will be seen as straight talking; which is a good thing because you can then have policies which are either nativist or classist and nobody will scrutinise you because they will all be hooting about the person who you have chosen to make into a pariah.
You might also like to set up your own newspaper/radio station/television station. This is where you can broadcast your narrative of whatever you like. You can also have opinionistas who look a bit newsy but because they will spruik think pieces, they won't actually be under the relevant legislation to do with news broadcasting.
It might take you a while to finally convince people to vote for you but it can be done. The big hook lines will be that you are the first to truly listen to the people (even though you're totally not), that you have the solution to the problems (which you will totally cause), and that nobody else can solve the problems and make your country soar to the heights that it once did in some imagined past that never existed. If this involves myth making then make sure that you invoke some imagined founding fathers, or some abstract concept like freedoms, or security, or religion, or some other thing that the people can be easily manipulated into believing.
Keep it simple and stupid. Better yet, invent a slogan which is so vague that you can not be held accountable if you don't happen to succeed in doing it, and so vague that the people can project whatever they can imagine into it. If the people feel as though they own the slogan, then you can make them believe things that even go against what they benefit from and even the economic systems that in some cases literally keep them alive. Here are a few to pick from:
- Hope and change.
- Jobs and growth.
- It's time.
- Fightback!
- Making it great.
- Free society, free people.
- Work makes you free.
- Make it great again.
You will also need to find someone who you can build a cult of personality around. If the system allows the same person to stay around for a while, this might be a problem but if you are in some kind of rotating democratic system (which I know is annoying you will have to live with it for the time being - it can be changed at a later date) then you can apply the same principles of demonising your enemies as you did to the people that you ejected from your own party.
Pick out some really trifling trait about the leader of the opposition party. Call them too old, too young, question some decision that they made 20 years ago in parliament. If you can find some moral failing in their past then exploit it; it doesn't matter if you have committed that same moral failing, you only need to accuse your enemy. Insult the media. Accuse the press of publishing lies. Accuse the media of being too liberal, too timid, or of protecting your political rivals for their own gain. It's probably not true but as long as you repeat a thing often enough, it will feel true to the people. Maybe even buy some clandestine agents in the press or on social media.
Above all, keep on making the same inane points over and over again. The people who will vote for you mustn't be allowed to think too deeply about what they are voting for.
The method that you use to acquire power, which by the way is the ends to itself, must be democratic. If there has been a military takeover, then that means may be used against you at some point. While you do want power, getting it all at once via a military coup sets you up to be liable for a civil war. The aim should be civil obedience, even though you are decidedly uncivil about what you intend to do.
If you can find an affable incompetent to lead your party into winning an election then that will do, however if you have already generated a cult of personality around someone who has a vision, the people will already voluntarily line up behind you.
Once you have won an election, you need to start buying the favour of just enough of the middle class to keep you there. The poors will probably never vote for you but if you can convince the upper half of the middle class then that should be enough as in a democracy you only need to win 50% of the votes + 1 (maybe less according to the rules).
You can do this via patronage of the things that the upper middle class likes but which the poors do not have access to. Private school education is brilliant for this because you can literally spend public money to buy private votes. If you can change taxation policy to reward those people who derive income from the real work of other people, then that's also brilliant because you can create a sense of aspirationalism among part of the middle class as well as demonising the poor. If you can privatise things like the utility companies, the healthcare system and physical infrastructure like roads and railways, then even though the people absolutely need those things for the proper functioning of society (and in some cases, to actually stay alive) then do it. Private profits at public expense will help the people who fund you and thus keep the symbiotic relationship maintained.
You might also want to crack down on guilds, unions, trade associations, and anything which the poor might use to organise themselves into to complain about their lack of power. Accuse them of communism, socialism, sovietism, or simply make them look feeble by comparing them with spaced out nature types. Enforce this with police power and raid their offices.
If you want to get rid of the people who could possibly question what you have to say, then you might want to think about either defunding the humanities departments at universities, or think about installing your own centres for history. Whoever controls the past, controls the future. Once you've got rid of all of the people who might want to critique your politics, then it becomes really easy to make it look like you're increasing funding to the sciences even though you aren't.
You might also like to defund the state broadcaster who aren't motivated by the profit motive but have a claim on investigating the truth. If journalists actually do discover that you have been covertly operating spies in foreign countries for the benefit of private corporations (which your party members might be employed by) or perhaps if they discover atrocities which your military has committed, then you can get either the Federal Police to raid their offices or gt the Secret Police to conduct trials also in secret.
You should also think about making sure that just enough people have access to guns and weapons so that there is just enough domestic terrorism and unrest, that you can come in and appear to solve; thus looking like a hero to the people. It doesn't even matter if the people who cause the unrest are nominally on your side because you will have already demonised the racists.
Curate a healthy sense of nationalism and nativism by demonising immigrants, including if they escaping other brutal regimes. Accuse immigrants of taking all the jobs even in spite of your friends moving operations to places where wages and working conditions are minimal. Blame the immigrants and lock them up; lock them up in detention centres that are far away from population centres or even on island exclaves, because if the people can't see what you are doing, they can't complain about it.
...
If any of this sounds vaguely familiar, that's because it should be. Many of these policies were enacted by Germany from about 1929 onwards and that didn't turn out badly at all. Many of these policies have been enacted by the United States from 1981 onwards and that country has gone on to be a shining bacon¹ of democracy. A lot of these policies have been enacted in Australia from about 1997 onwards.
All of this is possible because people are inherently selfish. The slide towards some kind of facism/feudalism/aggressive colonial capitalism is possible because those with power like to keep it. Actual democracy² is rare.
And as for the argument that poor people want to anarchy because in some places they are suggesting to defund the police, that is just plain stupid.
You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.
- G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
¹No, that's not a typo. A shining beacon provides light to all but a shining bacon provides undeserved deliciousness.
²Athenian democracy wasn't really democracy either because the only people eligible to vote were males over the age of 35; which looks staggeringly like most of history as well as most boardrooms of corporations.
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