You don’t have to be a political scientist to recognize that discontent is a key driver of fascism. It’s an ideology built to exploit widespread public grievances — economic hardship, feelings of humiliation, political instability. A fascist offers solutions to your problems in exchange for the surrender of your freedom; you do not make that decision easily unless you have reached a breaking point from living within the existing status quo.
(Of course, just because somebody feels hard-done by does not de facto mean they are actually a victim. I’m not suggesting that discontent justifies fascism — anyone can attempt to martyr themselves whenever they want, after all — just that fascism germinates from a collective sense of resentment.)
All of the kitchen-table issues that academics and pollsters tell us matter to the average voter — those revolve around these grievances. People are upset that they can’t afford groceries or gas, that they’re crushed by student loans, that they can’t find jobs. These are grievances derived from national, systemic failures.
Now ask yourself when you last heard or saw a politician give you belief or hope for a better future. And I don’t mean generic, focus-grouped sound bites about the “American Dream” and the country we used to think we lived in. I’m talking about an actual conceptualization of what the United States could look like in a decade and a roadmap for getting us there.
Hold that thought. We’ll come back to it in a bit.
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I recently read a Slate article from London-based contributor Imogen West-Knights, who traveled to Finland in search of happiness. Finland has placed first in the World Happiness Report for the past eight years consecutively, and it hasn’t been close. West-Knights wanted to investigate that phenomenon and understand what drives happiness levels in Finland so much higher than they are even in neighboring Nordic countries like Denmark or Sweden, and functionally talked Visit Finland into bringing her to the country for a “Happiness Masterclass” designed to give her a crash course in exactly that.
Ultimately, West-Knights discovered that happiness in Finland looks more like a sense of security than it does the stylized version of bliss that we often see in movies or on TV. Finns don’t even necessarily think of themselves as a particularly happy people, West-Knights realized. Instead, Finns derive a sense of comfort and contentment from knowing they will be looked after — a perceived safety that comes from having “one of the largest reservist armies in the world, an underground latticework of everything-proof bunkers beneath Helsinki big enough to house…well over the actual population of Helsinki,” and an air-raid siren test on the first Monday of every month at noon. It’s a sense of preparedness that reassures them that everything will be okay. As a Finnish art gallery guide told West-Knights:
“The reasons why we are the happiest people, things like very little corruption, trusting in the government and the powers that be, trusting in the police, paying high taxes but believing that the taxes are used for our benefit, for our free education and subsidized health care — all of these things, if you’re a Finn and live in Finland, you don’t necessarily realize how happy they make you. But when you go abroad and come back, then you see it. So I think the happiness is sort of surreptitious. It’s like an undercurrent in our lives.”
It’s a really interesting take on happiness, but also one that feels embarrassingly self-evident.
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I hope it’s obvious where I’m headed with this. If fascism is a byproduct of widespread public grievance, then we can prevent the ideology from taking root by creating a society without discontent — or at least a society where most people feel cared for. And if that kind of society can exist in a gray and modest place like Finland, there should be hope that it can exist in a place like America, too.
But I don’t think anybody is doing a great job of making that case right now. Or most people aren’t, anyway — if your answer to my earlier question about the last politician you recognized as describing a future you want to believe in was someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, or Zohran Mamdani, then you already know that we need a new type of political leader and public official in this country.
Because I think American leftists and progressives should be able to make this case, if they can will themselves away from the kind of reactionary politicking that dominates headlines but fails to make any kind of lasting stamp on the lives of the average citizen. It should actually be pretty straightforward, and you can start building the argument with numbers alone.
Air Force veteran, security consultant, and author Christopher Armitage recently came as close as I’ve ever seen anyone come to creating this explicit vision for a country we could live in. In exploring federal data from 2023-2024 across states with at least eight years of consistent single-party control, Armitage found that Democratic states overwhelmingly outperform Republican states on “health outcomes, education quality, and personal freedoms.” The only two categories where red states beat their blue counterparts are cheaper housing and lower taxes.
There is a full nine-year gap between life expectancy in Hawaii, which sits at the top of this particular ranking, and Mississipi, which sits last. The states below Hawaii — Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York — lean blue, while the states at the bottom of the table with Mississippi — West Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Kentucky — are red.
Massachusetts also has the lowest uninsured rate in America at 2.9 percent. Texas has the highest at 18.8 percent. In Massachusetts, 17 mothers die for every 100,000 births. In Louisiana, that number is just over 58. If Mississippi had Massachusett’s infant mortality rate, 250 fewer babies would die in the state than do currently.
Republicans also like to tout their economic acumen and strength as evidence of their success. But the numbers tell a different story here as well: Maryland’s median household income is the highest in the country at $108,200, followed closely by Massachusetts and Connecticut. Mississippi’s sits at $52,700 — and even when you adjust for cost of living, Mississippi’s purchasing power still sits dead last in the country. Poverty numbers, including childhood poverty statistics, are worse.
I’ll pause here for fear of accidentally rewriting Armitage’s entire piece, but there are few things I would recommend reading more than his analysis of this phenomenon. Because as he puts it, “This isn't bad luck or geography. It's what the Repulican party wants for it’s constituents.”
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Democrats and Republicans fight over these policies already at the national level. But they do it without cohesion; there is no sense of what the country we are working toward looks like. Defining that future and selling it to the country — that is what the Obama campaign did so well, and why it was so successful in giving the public hope for a better tomorrow (whether or not you believe he subsequently delivered on that promise).
It's time for a new dawn. In the face of burgeoning fascism and authoritarianism, we need to have hope for our culture and country — and we need leaders that have that hope themselves and can share it with us. We need to feel heard, seen, and taken care of. We need to be free to live our lives without worrying about being unable to afford prescription medication, losing our housing, or stray bullets finding their way to us in the street. We need a nation that looks after its citizens, regardless of where they come from or who they are.
That's the American Dream I choose to believe in. And focusing on building that future, one policy at a time, is the only viable way forward.