How Fascism Stabilises — and How It Can Be Undone: 4 Why Opposition Often Strengthens Fascism

At first glance, resisting fascist coordination seems obvious: call it out, argue against it, expose it. And yet, relationally, these moves often strengthen the system rather than weaken it. Understanding why requires examining how fascism organises intelligibility under pressure.

---

1. The Self‑Reinforcing System

Fascist coordination is not a fragile façade; it is self-reinforcing:

• fear and simplicity compress intelligibility

• normativity hardens under existential pressure

• participants internalise and enforce the system

Opposition that attacks the system without changing its internal pressures is treated as external threat. The system responds by:

• doubling down on binaries

• moralising dissent

• reinforcing the “necessity” of rigidity

This is why public denunciations, protests, or moral arguments frequently increase alignment rather than disrupt it.

---

2. Why Being “Right” Is Often Irrelevant

Traditional opposition assumes that demonstrating truth or justice will cause alignment to shift. Relationally, truth alone is insufficient:

• fascist systems do not collapse because ideas are false

• they collapse when intelligibility itself is destabilised or made revisable

Being “right” only matters if the system can take up the new distinctions. Otherwise, correctness is noise, not leverage.

---

3. Spectacle and Affective Capture

Opposition often plays into the system’s affective machinery:

• outrage generates attention

• moral indignation validates the narrative of threat

• visible dissent becomes a foil that justifies further simplification and binary enforcement

In other words, conventional opposition is co-opted as coordination reinforcement.

---

4. The Illusion of Containment

Opponents often treat fascist systems as something that can be contained or corrected from the outside. In relational terms, this is a category error:

• fascism is sustained by internal pressures, not external argument

• interventions that ignore these pressures are perceived as noise, threat, or error

• the system’s intelligibility absorbs, repels, or weaponises the opposition

This is why interventions that seem logical or moral often backfire — the system is structurally insulated against them.

---

5. The Relational Path Forward

Subversion requires understanding what makes the system coherent. Effective moves:

• do not attack binaries directly

• focus on reopening revisable distinctions

• work at points where intelligibility can expand without collapsing coordination

• act through incremental, local recalibration rather than dramatic confrontation

The goal is not to “win” in the usual sense. It is to reshape the field so that alternatives are intelligible and survivable.

---

Conclusion

Opposition, framed in the usual moral or ideological terms, often strengthens fascism. The relational insight reframes resistance: it is not confrontation that matters, but strategic recalibration of intelligibility under pressure.

In the next post, we will examine how to perform subversion without triggering collapse, and why subtle interventions can be more powerful than heroic gestures: Post 5 — Subversion Without Collapse.