The Upside Down

Thoughts on Carnivals, Schismogenesis, and the Fever Dreams of Fascists

I always find this to be a wistful time of year. Summer is ending. The days are getting shorter and the nights are getting longer. Time is fleeting.

A More Perfect Union

The past nine months have been an incredibly disorienting time for me. The stable foundations I built my life on have been shaken. The moral injunctions my parents and society gave me as a child — get a good education, serve your country, help the less fortunate, don’t be cruel, don’t be racist — no longer seem to apply. What’s more, the policies and investments I believe made America exceptional — investments in science, medicine, and higher education, and commitments to civil rights, democracy, trade, and multiculturalism at home and abroad — have been upended. While, as a nation, we didn’t always live up to our espoused values, there seemed to be a shared consensus that this was the project: the formation of a more perfect union.

In my lifetime, this project was best expressed and embodied by President Obama. Again and again in his major speeches, he returned to the idea that America’s task was to narrow the gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of our time. In his 2017 farewell address, he reminded us:

“The gains of our long journey to freedom are not assured. In fact, every two steps forward can be followed by a step back… That’s the story of America. Not that our nation has been flawless from the start, but that we have shown the capacity to change, and make life better for those who follow.”

For Obama, imperfection was redeemed by progress; today, imperfection is denied altogether, history itself inverted into grievance and denial. As Trump recently tweeted:

“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

The nation has always been great, he insists, and it must be great again. For Obama, imperfection was a call to action; for Trump, it is an intolerable insult to national pride.

These are disorienting days. What were lies is now truth. What was bad is now good. What was wrong is now right. It is as though the world has been turned upside down.

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Carnival Without End

Throughout the Middle Ages, Europeans celebrated winter carnivals where they ritually inverted the world. Peasants became kings, fools became bishops, women dominated men, laws and customs were mocked in bacchanalian revelry. The mock rulers presiding over these festivals bore ridiculous titles: King of Fools, Lord of Misrule, Abbot of Unreason, Boy Bishop. They often ended with a symbolic dethroning or killing of the fool-king and the rebirth of order for the new year. Anthropologists have suggested that these rituals acted as release valves in societies marked by deep inequality and oppression.

Today, it feels like we are living in a grotesque carnival led by our own parade of fools — only this carnival never ends. The ritual inversion has become our permanent politics.

How could such a moral inversion come about? How could Americans embrace the very values we were taught were antithetical to our national identity?

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Schismogenesis

One concept that helps explain this inversion is schismogenesis, a term coined by anthropologist and systems thinker Gregory Bateson. Schismogenesis means “creation of division” and describes how groups define themselves in opposition to one another, escalating behavior in self-reinforcing feedback loops.

Today Republicans define themselves in opposition to everything they imagine liberals believe. Much of conservative politics now seems designed not to solve problems but to antagonize or dominate opponents. If you are for diversity, we are against diversity. If you support renewable energy, we oppose it. You like bike lanes? Then we hate them.

Bateson distinguished two kinds. In symmetrical schismogenesis, rivals mirror and outdo each other, producing cycles of tit-for-tat escalation — a pattern we can see in today’s partisan polarization. In complementary schismogenesis, one side asserts dominance while the other submits, which in turn encourages greater dominance — a dynamic visible inside today’s Republican Party, where loyalty to a single leader reinforces his power. Polarization creates the antagonism; authoritarian submission consolidates it.

The result is a grotesque inversion that feeds on itself, where escalation and domination are no longer means to an end but ends in themselves — a cycle of mutual reinforcement that corrodes trust, hollows institutions, and leaves little space for the unfinished project of perfecting our union.

For some, the transgressions permitted by this moral inversion are thrilling. To be relieved of the burden of obligation to others feels like freedom. To be our worst selves feels like honesty. No longer must we face the mistakes of our past, or accept the responsibility to learn, to grow, to change. We cast aside the unfinished work of building a more perfect union. No longer do we feel the weight of history.

Escalation alone cannot explain how conflict hardens into ideology; for that, we must look to fascism’s ability to ritualize inversion and transform division into myth.

Fascism as Permanent Inversion

Like carnival, fascism is a performative, mythic form of politics. It mobilizes the masses through inversion of truth, glorification of transgressive violence, and nostalgic myth. The fascist leader, like the fool-king of medieval carnival, becomes the protagonist and embodiment of national rebirth. The propaganda and rituals of fascist politics make the myth real, producing a climate where truth is subjective and all that matters is loyalty to the leader. But unlike carnival, fascism does not end with the fool’s dethroning. It enthrones him permanently, transforming temporary misrule into permanent inversion.

From Imagined Belonging to Imagined Exclusion

To understand how inversion hardens into ideology, we need to look at how communities are imagined into being — and how the same imagination that creates belonging can just as easily create exclusion. In his seminal 1983 work, Benedict Anderson argued that nations are “imagined communities.” He noted that while no one can ever meet more than a tiny fraction of their fellow citizens in a nation, members of that nation feel bound together in a sense of belonging. This sense of solidarity at scale, Anderson showed, became possible only with new media technologies — first print, then newspapers, then radio and television — which allowed millions of strangers to imagine themselves as part of the same story, living together in what he called “homogeneous, empty time.”

But the same media power that makes belonging possible also makes exclusion possible. Once you can imagine a vast community of people like yourself, you can just as easily imagine an equally vast group of people who do not belong. The nation’s imagined borders draw not only a circle of inclusion but also a shadow of exclusion.

Anderson’s later work, The Spectre of Comparisons, added a crucial twist: nations do not imagine themselves in isolation. They are always forming through comparison with others — measuring, envying, and contrasting. This comparative imagination creates pride and solidarity, but it also foments rivalry and resentment. Nations become whole, Anderson argued, by seeing themselves reflected against a threatening other.

This dynamic resonates with Gregory Bateson’s notion of schismogenesis — the feedback loops in which groups define themselves by comparison and opposition, producing identities defined less by what they are than by what they are not.

Fascism radicalizes this shadow side of national imagination. It turns the community of belonging into a community of exclusion, weaponizing comparison and schismogenesis through the amplifying force of media. Radio was essential to Hitler; newsreels and rallies were essential to Mussolini. Each medium provides the simultaneity and spectacle that make mass imagination possible — but in fascism, that imagination is directed toward scapegoating and division rather than solidarity and progress. Today’s social media accelerates this process by creating a fragmented and hyper-competitive media environment.

Fascism is best understood not as a rupture with Anderson’s “imagined community” but as its malignant mutation. Each new medium accelerates the latent processes of social distinction, giving exclusionary fantasies greater reach, speed, and emotional intensity. Where nationalism once defined itself against external rivals, fascism inverts and turns inward: the enemy is imagined as dwelling within the community itself. Jews in Germany, communists in Italy, “globalists,” immigrants, or “woke elites” in today’s America — all are cast as traitors poisoning the nation from within.

This inward turn makes fascism distinct. The imagined community becomes a negatively imagined community, held together less by solidarity than by suspicion. The sense of belonging is preserved, but only by purging those declared impure. In this way, the same technologies that once enabled solidarity — newspapers, radios, social media feeds — are retooled to synchronize exclusion, scapegoating, and mythic violence against the community’s own members. Social media accelerates this process. It incentivizes outrage, undermines common knowledge, proliferates misinformation, and fragments the public into antagonistic camps.

Writing long before the internet, Hannah Arendt warned that totalitarian movements flourish when individuals are isolated and uprooted and the very distinction between truth and falsehood collapses:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true.” - Origins of Totalitarianism

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The Five Imaginings of Fascism

At the foundation of fascist politics are five core myths or imaginings. These are the malignant mutations of Anderson’s Imagined Communities.

Imagined Enemies
Someone is to blame for the state of the world. Fascism must have scapegoats. It divides society into a virtuous “us” and a demonized “them.” The out-group may be Jews, immigrants, liberals, or any minority blamed for undermining the nation. Aggression is projected onto them: Jews are plotting genocide against Germans, Mexicans are racists, Palestinians are terrorists. Followers are praised for cruelty toward these imagined enemies, released from the constraints of law and decency.

Imagined Injury
In fascism, the dominant group imagines itself as the greatest victim: men oppressed by feminism, whites oppressed by Blacks, Germans oppressed by Jews. Privilege lost is framed as rights denied. Power relations are inverted — the powerful claim powerlessness, the majority claims to be oppressed by minorities. This persecution complex absolves followers of responsibility and fuels resentment.

Imagined Emergency
Fascism thrives on constant crisis. Emergencies justify suspending law and morality. Supporters are kept in a state of mobilization through propaganda and manufactured threats. Hitler consolidated power through the Reichstag fire. Today’s “immigrant invasion” and “urban crime epidemic” rhetoric plays the same role. Emergencies suspend normal politics and make the extraordinary seem necessary.

Imagined Past
Every fascist movement invokes a lost golden age. Mussolini evoked the glory of Rome; Nazis glorified “blood and soil”; Trump proclaims we must make America “great again.” These myths of rebirth cloak radical change as restoration. The nation, they insist, has not been broken but betrayed — and must be redeemed by returning to its “true” path.

Imagined Purity
At the center of fascist obsession lies purity. Diversity, dissent, and cosmopolitanism are cast as sources of national decay. Fascism promises renewal through cleansing: one language, one set of values, one cultural canon. Purity provides the moral justification for exclusion and extermination. It also gives fascism its pseudo-utopian allure: the fantasy of a regenerated, homogeneous society unburdened by the messiness of pluralism.

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The Grotesque Carnival: Masks of Fascism

It’s not that hard to go through the list above and check off the boxes regarding our current situation. Kara Swisher recently interviewed former Yale professor and fascism expert Jason Stanley on her podcast. Stanley described the Trump administration’s policies to date as “cartoonish, paint-by-numbers fascism.” But if it is this obvious to the experts, why have the American media and elite been so slow to recognize and react to this clear and present danger?

Carnival has always thrived on masks. In medieval festivals, the masks made inversion safe: everyone knew the fool was only a fool, the bishop only a parody. When the mask came off, order returned.

Fascism too wears masks — but here, the deception is deadly serious. Its imagined pillars are disguised as virtues:

• Enemy masked as Defense (“we’re not persecuting, we’re protecting”).

• Injury masked as Rights (“we’re not privileged, we’re silenced”).

• Emergency masked as Order (“we’re not suspending law, we’re establishing order”).

• Past masked as Tradition (“we’re not regressing, we’re restoring glory”).

• Purity masked as Renewal (“we’re not excluding, we’re cleansing corruption”).

These masks make fascism palatable to those who should know better. Political elites tell themselves they are just riding a wave of populism. Institutional leaders reassure themselves that norms will hold. Journalists, bound by conventions of neutrality, balance, and restraint, treat extremism as just another side of partisan conflict. Media corporations, chasing clicks and ratings, amplify the carnival because spectacle sells.

The effect is that warnings are pathologized as alarmism, while myths are normalized as legitimate grievances. When Trump’s own generals and advisors compared his behavior to fascism, their words were treated as little more than an internal dispute. And when Kamala Harris called Trump a fascist during the campaign, the media’s attention fixated less on the substance of the charge than on the supposed impropriety of the word itself. “Fascist” had been reduced to a slur. Naming fascism seemed radical; repeating its myths seemed routine.

If carnival was once a ritual of misrule that ended with the fool’s dethroning, fascism is its grotesque mutation — a carnival where the masks never come off and inversion never ends. Our task is not only to name the inversion, but to strip away the masks before parody hardens into our permanent political reality.