Originally Posted by roachboy

last times out, fascism drew its primary inspiration and support from what you might call petit bourgeois common sense. it is convenient to imagine such regimes as state-driven, that the ideology was imposed on unwitting folk from the top down. but that is not how it went: people internalized this politics, recapitulated its logic, supported it because they imagined that it made them safe---from the Big Scary Other, from Change economic, social, cultural---from percieved contaminants that endangered some illusory pure culture--a notion (pure culture) that is wholly absurd, wholly indefensable, that cannot be discussed explicitly and expect to survive the conversation--perhaps all these are the more powerful because they are types of secret beliefs, held away from critique by all kinds of psychological defense mechanisms..