Soft Fascism

The age of anxiety
Richard Sennett
The Guardian
October 23, 2004

Hard fascism rams home to the citizen that he or she is held in that iron grip, as in Mussolini's theatre of force or George Orwell's nightmare Nineteen Eighty-four. Soft fascism is not so much a velvet glove as an invisible hand, the operations of control hidden from scrutiny as Patriot Act II, and more, internal repression presented to the public as merely preventive action against threats that have yet to materialize. The Bush administration acted in this preventive way, for instance, by shutting three of the larger Muslim charities in America, not for anything they had done, but for what might happen, some time, somewhere. In hard fascism the state exploits concrete fear, in soft fascism the state exploits diffuse anxiety…

Reality TV and its like have made invasion of privacy into popular entertainment. The pleasure of stripping away privacy fits into an economy where high-tech firms such as Oracle make large profits from developing personal data bases, listening devices, and auditing software for business. Government destruction of private rights thus become "naturalized": the public already enjoys the act of stripping people naked, and this intrusion is just an extension of how business gets done in the computer age… Read more.