Fascism and Bad Faith

This Vibe Shift Is Not Happening By Accident

A critical alternate consciousness is manifesting in myriad ways. It's a hopeful development in a hopeless time.

The white lodge is begging to be heard.

In Twin Peaks, the quirky, surrealist early-90s TV show that returned for one glorious final season in 2017, there are two competing lodges: The white lodge, controlled by good-hearted, well-meaning entities who try their damndest to help humanity, and the black lodge, home of the evil, scheming spirits that appeal to humankind’s darkest desires. The inhabitants of the black lodge, naturally, meet regularly above a convenience store. The white lodge, naturally, includes David Bowie in tea kettle form.

It’s in the first season of Twin Peaks that Agent Dale Cooper, a coffee-guzzling FBI agent and a stand-in for show co-creator David Lynch, is contacted by a representative of the white lodge. The entity – known as the fireman – tries to warn Cooper of the possessed citizen of Twin Peaks, Washington, who has committed two murders and would soon commit a third under the influence of the vile black lodge schemers.

The black and white lodges played this little game throughout the TV series, jostling for control, trying to break the balance if only for a little while.

At the risk of writing off the Trump regime’s unconscionable actions and policy goals as the doings of hellish creatures from some extra-dimensional factory of evil, I think we are seeing – over these past couple months – a sort of all-encompassing national and international white lodge backlash to a regime increasingly perceived as unfailingly repugnant. People inside and outside the US are seeing what it’s like to cede power to real-deal fascists and, so far, they fucking hate it.

First there was the little-publicized shock special election result in Pennsylvania, where a Democrat won a state senate seat that had been held by a Republican who won the seat by 33 points back in 2018 (Trump won that district by 15 points in 2024). Then we saw Democrats with a landslide victory in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race that all but ended Elon Musk’s interest in electoral politics. That same day we saw a +35 Republican seat in Florida’s panhandle stay in GOP hands by a +14 margin, “the functional equivalent of Republicans running a competitive race in the district that is represented by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”

Then there’s the international backlash, the shit that tells us just how repellant outsiders find our little competitive authoritarian situation. In Germany's February elections, the neo-nazi party known as AfD – a favorite of JD Vance and Elon Musk, who urged Germans to "move beyond the guilt" of the literal Holocaust – did not have the strong showing many election observers had anticipated. Turns out Germans were repulsed by United States officials coming to their country to back the resurgent fascist forces that destroyed the country and much of Europe a mere eighty years ago.

The Liberal Party of Canada made a Patriots-over-Falcons style comeback in the months after Trump won back power on the strength of short memories and powerful algorithms. Canadian liberals had no avenue to victory in the 2025 race until Trump won and introduced an idea for which there is no constituency outside the blackpilled broken brains on Musk’s fascist X machine (the everything app): Annexing Canada as America’s 51st state. And by annexing, Trump means conquering.

Matt Ryan collapses and Canadian liberals come back from 28-3 in the third quarter.

The sense that fascism is not fun and in fact quite bad seemed to permeate the Australian elections in the final couple months of their 2025 races, and like we saw in Canada, the Australian left was buoyed by folks who very much did not want to fuck around with this Trump shit. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese went from having almost no path to a second term to breezing past his center-right opponent, the Trump-friendly Peter Dutton, who not only lost the prime minister race but also his longtime seat in the country's parliament.

This wasn't a squeaker either. Australia's Labor Party went from a razor-thin parliamentary majority to a comfortable one following the early May elections. I am not an Australian politics knower – nor by I play one online – but judging by pre-election coverage from BBC and Sky News, our big fascist boy in the White House played an outsized factor in the nation's elections. People have seen what it's like to have an unelected co-president with an army of stormtrooper-hackers committing daily crimes against the republic, a government that refuses to recognize constitutional governance, run by the most painfully ignorant, ill-equipped hatchet men and women, and they are horrified, sickened by it. They want none of that.

Maybe Australian voters simply wanted someone the polar opposite of Trump or maybe they wanted a leader who would defend against the Trump regime's push to tank the world economy. Either way, our shitty circumstances – the result of high egg prices in 2021 – have been repellent to people around the world. They have watched in real time as a man who campaigned on repealing the 20th century and stuffing American democracy into a wood chipper follows through with his promises while those who stupidly put him in power feign shock and horror at the circumstances for which they are responsible.

Analysis of the Australian elections showed the country's Labor Party didn't so much peel off huge swaths of voters in regions where they have traditionally struggled as much as they saw support surge in areas that usually back the party. There was a similar trend in the Canadian elections, though not as pronounced.

This is what we saw in Wisconsin during the state's Supreme Court election in April: The entire state shifted toward the liberal candidate compared to the 2024 election, but it was in the state's Democratic strongholds that turnout and support skyrocketed to levels that outpaced even the 2020 election. Perhaps – just maybe – it's a lesson for Democratic Party candidates to invigorate their base rather than trying and failing every two or four years to appeal to Americans who have taken ritual blood oaths never to vote for a Democrat.

A Shifting Consciousness

There is, of course, no mystical lodge full of Lynchian otherworldly beings looking out for the best interests of human beings, and what we've seen over the past ninety days should not be written off as shifting momentum, another mystical force that – intentionally or otherwise – removes agency from the people changing strategies and their mindset in the face of a skilled and determined opposition.

Richard Rohr, an American Franciscan priest who has written eloquently about consciousness in the modern world, wrote in the late-1990s about the idea of a "critical alternate consciousness" that emerges when power structures become stale or when political and cultural norms are perceived as overbearing – intolerable, even. The zoomers might call this a "vibe shift."

"Once we have an establishment, we will eventually have a dis-establishment," said Rohr, a longtime advocate for orthopraxy, or the belief that lifestyle and practice are more important than mere verbal orthodoxy. "When some have all the power, those who don't have power ask very different questions and the pendulum swings back again – eventually. That has been the story of most of history and the sequencing of most revolutions."

The asking of different questions might define whatever emerges from this catastrophic second Trump term. This time around – with unprecedented civic action and a sense not of urgency, but of emergency – pro-democracy Americans are not simply asking how they can defeat the forces of fascism in the next election, as they did leading up to 2020. This time folks are radicalized by what they (rightly) see as the dissolution of longstanding democratic norms and structures that have been carefully dismantled by Musk and Trump and others committed to implementing the entire devilish playbook known as Project 2025.

Folks are not asking how Democrats might be able to convert a few thousand Midwestern Trump backers for the next presidential election. They are asking how we should approach an unprecedented constitutional crisis in a political environment without a unified opposition party (there are more than a few indications this could change after the midterms, with so many calcified, useless Democrats bowing out). These are normies asking these questions. They are not avowed leftists citing Karl Marx on Bluesky. These are not academics drawing inspiration from the history of anti-fascist movements. These are normies, people who would rather be living their lives than centering their existences on opposing the authoritarian menace that has descended on us all, even those who are blissfully unaware of the changes in the air.

This is the forces of dis-establishment Rohr references a quarter century ago. This is the critical alternate consciousness coalescing not just in the United States, one of the two epicenters of international fascism under Trump, but of people across the world. And as Rohr said, this alternate consciousness is bringing about very different questions that will lead to very different answers in the months and years ahead.

The American right began asking different questions after the Republican Party couldn't quite pull off a violent coup following Trump's 2020 loss. They were not only interested in reclaiming power after a hiccup in 2020; they wanted to create the conditions for tyranny, for unbreakable one-party rule. How can we achieve uninterrupted domination of the country, they asked. They saw a path to this outcome through the illegal dismantling of the U.S. bureaucracy and the politicization of the entire administrative state, the entity that makes life tick in America. With wretched, unpopular policies that sometimes gain voter approval through the power of bad faith, Republicans began asking questions about how they could seize power without doing the work of elections and politics and democracy.

The right's different questions in the wake of 2020's racial justice uprising and the Democrats' victory led to a simple and dark answer: Dissolve representative democracy, replace the government with machines programmed to abide by fascist logic, and use the vast power of a deeply-militarized state to crush dissent and persecute opposition figures, as we saw when the regime arrested the Democratic mayor of Newark and a judge in Wisconsin for opposing the government's ethnic cleansing program. This all started with different questions asked in the months after Trump lost to a replacement-level Democrat.

Today's critical alternate consciousness is creating a populace brimming with folks who don't necessarily want to clash with mostly likeminded people about healthcare policy or energy policy, who don't want to re-litigate the Democratic primary wars of 2016 and 2020. They are asking a far more basic, fundamental question: Do we want to live in a democratic republic or do we want to live under a permanent authoritarian movement operated by those who have dismissed democracy as an option for the United States? Those are now our choices.

The election of a pope who has been highly critical of America's first dictator and his sniveling vice president is another manifestation of this critical alternate consciousness, I think. Though you don't gotta hand it to the Vatican, you should recognize the impulse behind selecting a somewhat liberal priest from Chicago at a time when the US is sliding at breakneck speed into authoritarianism. This, I think, is part of a larger balancing act as forces of repression have gained power and influence in an age defined by social media algorithms that largely control human events. It's no accident of fate that an American pope emerged amid a fascist U.S. insurgency that has taken hold of the levers of power, and in some cases snapped those levers clear off.

It's not that Cardinal Robert Prevost was accidentally elected as the head of the Catholic Church. Some unseen force from a lodge in the sky did not put him in such a position of power, just as no lodge creature from the Twin Peaks universe possessed Donald Trump and made him to most destructive American in history. That the world is reacting with such urgency to the American fascist project is no accident, however.

There is no white lodge, but if there were, it would be desperate to be heard in these times, and it's undeniable that people are now willing to listen. The questions that emerge from that listening, from that shift in consciousness, will define the rest of our lives.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.