The Fascist Spectacle

How Authoritarianism Wins When We Look Away

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And while the constitutional order groans under the weight of authoritarian encroachment, the political conversation is once again consumed by Joe Biden's cognitive decline.

This is not an essay about Biden's health. It is not a defense of palace intrigue. It is not a denial of reality. Biden is old. He is slowing. This is visible. It should be discussed soberly.

But what is happening right now is not sober. It is not rational. It is not motivated by concern for the republic. It is a performance. A spectacle. A ritual of expiation for the center-left—a desperate penance for having failed to produce a more perfect candidate, now performed in full view of an ascendant authoritarian movement that is actively dismantling the rule of law.

And while liberal columnists self-flagellate over who knew what when, the president of the United States is attempting to override Supreme Court orders, turning federal agencies into instruments of revenge, installing donor-industrial networks into the machinery of state, and enriching himself through foreign emoluments with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Let us speak plainly: Trump is the problem. Trumpism is the threat. Biden is not the danger. Biden is the spectacle being used to distract from the danger.

The Machinery of Fascist Propaganda

This is how fascist propaganda functions: not through crude lies easily disprovable, but through the manipulation of attention itself. It doesn't simply deny reality—it drowns reality in manufactured crisis. It creates spectacles that consume our cognitive bandwidth while the real work of dismantling democracy proceeds in plain sight.

The fascist propagandist understands that human attention is finite. We can only focus on so many things at once. By creating constant noise around peripheral issues, they ensure the central crime—the actual seizure of power—goes relatively unscrutinized.

In her landmark work on propaganda, Hannah Arendt noted that “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction... and the distinction between true and false... no longer exist.” The goal is not to make you believe specific falsehoods, but to exhaust your capacity to distinguish between what matters and what doesn't.

The Biden spectacle is a perfect example of this machinery at work. It creates the illusion of moral equivalence between administrative weakness and constitutional destruction. It demands we treat fallibility as equal to corruption, forgetting a name as equivalent to rejecting court orders, stepping aside when ill as comparable to refusing to do so when unfit.

We've seen this play before. In 2016, we were told that Clinton's emails were the great moral failing of our time. That her slipperiness justified moral equivalence. That electing a narcissistic demagogue with no regard for law or truth was a reasonable trade-off to defeat the specter of liberal hypocrisy.

Now, the same game is being played. This time the script features Biden's mental acuity. The story is familiar: yes, Trump is corrupt, unstable, dangerous, perhaps even criminal—but Biden! He forgot a name. He deferred too often to staff. He kept secrets. He let people believe he was sharper than he is. And for this, we must make him the story. We must obsess. We must center our coverage, our concern, our national attention not on the dismantling of democracy but on the possibility that a tired old man stayed too long in the ring.

And many in the center-left are falling for it.

How the Center Participates in Its Own Destruction

Feeling burned by accusations of bias, terrified of seeming tribal, desperate to reclaim moral high ground, they respond not with clarity but with contrition. They tell us they “understand the frustration.” They nod solemnly at the talking points of the very people who are burning the foundations of liberal democracy to the ground.

This is not moral clarity. This is not institutional responsibility. This is submission.

It resembles what psychologists call “identified victim effect”—our tendency to focus intensely on specific, identifiable victims while remaining unmoved by larger, more abstract harms. Biden's memory lapses create concrete, emotionally resonant stories. A president mixing up names makes for compelling television. A flubbed answer produces viral clips that spread across social media. Cable news can play these moments on loop, driving ratings as pundits speculate endlessly about their significance.

Meanwhile, the systematic destruction of democratic institutions feels abstract, distant, theoretical—even as it happens in plain sight. There are no viral clips of the Constitution being eroded. The dismantling of regulatory agencies doesn't produce easily shareable moments. The corruption of judicial independence doesn't fit neatly into social media's attention economy.

The fascist propagandist exploits this cognitive tendency. They understand that humans naturally focus on visible drama rather than underlying systems. So they create spectacle after spectacle, each one carefully crafted to trigger emotional responses that override rational analysis.

When we participate in these spectacles—when we allow them to dominate our attention, our discourse, our political energy—we become unwitting accomplices in the machinery of distraction.

There is a difference between accountability and scapegoating. There is a difference between critique and ritualized guilt. There is a difference between sober concern for leadership succession and panic that empowers the enemies of democracy.

What we are seeing is not democracy in action. It is not the immune system working. It is a kind of cultural autoimmunity—an overreaction so intense it threatens to do more damage than the condition it is supposedly treating.

Propaganda and the Illusion of Symmetry

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of fascist propaganda is its corruption of democratic values themselves. It weaponizes our commitment to fairness, balance, and objectivity against us.

“Both sides” becomes a cudgel to enforce false equivalence. “Fairness” becomes a demand to treat minor flaws and existential threats as comparable. “Balance” becomes an excuse to normalize the abnormal.

We see this same pattern in the institutions meant to guard our democracy. Consider the recent Supreme Court ruling on the Alien Enemies Act. Seven justices recognized that fundamental due process rights cannot be discarded, even for national security. But the dissenters—Thomas and Alito—showed us something different. Their vision isn't judicial conservatism; it's judicial surrender. They serve not the Constitution but power itself. Their dissent isn't legal disagreement; it's the abandonment of judicial function. They would strip courts of their most essential purpose: ensuring that no one, not even a president, stands above the law.

Their vision of America isn't a constitutional republic but an elected monarchy, where presidential whim trumps constitutional constraint. Their legal reasoning isn't conservative—it's monarchical. They offer not jurisprudence but genuflection.

This distinction—between conservative jurisprudence that respects constitutional limits and fascist legalism that worships executive power—mirrors exactly what we see in our broader discourse. The propagandist knows that liberal democracy depends on certain norms—on shared commitment to truth, on basic agreement about facts, on the distinction between criticism and destruction. And so they systematically exploit these norms, using our own values as weapons against us.

When journalists feel compelled to give equal time to Biden's verbal stumbles and Trump's constitutional violations, they aren't practicing objectivity—they're participating in propaganda. When pundits frame democratic decay as just another horse-race story, they aren't being neutral—they're enabling authoritarianism. When voters treat the defense of constitutional order as just another partisan position, they've already surrendered to the logic of fascism.

Let us remember: the Republican Party just helped reelect a man who attempted a coup. Who has promised to prosecute political opponents. Who openly defies courts. Who runs a crypto-scam government. Who accepted a $400 million foreign jet. Who governs by vengeance and conspiracy.

And we are being told that the real story is Biden's cognitive slippage.

Enough.

Holding the Wire

The center-left must snap out of it. The journalists who still believe in democracy must refuse to be manipulated by manufactured equivalence. The pundits who know better must stop laundering fascist talking points under the guise of evenhandedness. The voters who care about the republic must recognize this spectacle for what it is: a trap.

We cannot protect democracy by apologizing ourselves into paralysis. We cannot fight authoritarianism by helping it frame the narrative. We cannot hold the center by abandoning our senses.

The fascist spectacle succeeds when it exhausts us—when we become too tired to distinguish between real threats and manufactured crises, when we lose the energy to maintain moral clarity in the face of deliberate confusion. It succeeds when we surrender our attention to its carefully orchestrated distractions.

The defense against this machinery is not complicated, though it requires discipline: We must reclaim our capacity to focus on what matters. We must refuse the constant invitation to outrage over trivialities. We must maintain proportion and perspective even when the information environment is designed to distort both.

This doesn't mean ignoring legitimate concerns about leadership. It means addressing them with clarity and context rather than panic and performative guilt. It means recognizing when our attention is being manipulated and refusing to participate in that manipulation.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And we do not have time to waste indulging manufactured scandal while the republic burns.

The center must be held. Not by demanding perfection. But by refusing the bait.

That refusal is our last, best hope.