Fascism as Consequence: How Communication Systems (can) Drift Toward Dictatorship

Fascism does not begin with a dictator. Recurrent relations of threat, identity and authority can become self-reinforcing until a leader occupies—and intensifies—the position they have made possible.

Fascism does not enter society from outside. Before it becomes a regime imposed through institutions, it develops through the relations by which a society communicates. Differences of identity, threat and authority recur across populations, organisations and media until they begin to organise how later events are perceived. A people, an enemy, a betrayal and a leader come to appear as facts that communication merely describes, although communication has helped produce them.

This is more unsettling than saying people sometimes choose fascism. Fascism is something people do, but also something that can happen through what they do: a configuration of relations that emerges from human action, alters the conditions of subsequent action and recruits participants into reproducing it. This does not abolish agency or responsibility. It explains why intention alone cannot account for a system no participant contains. Fascistic relations help produce the political subjects through whom fascism persists.

Complexity does not cause fascism, and technology does not mechanically lead to dictatorship. The transition occurs when compressed relations among identity, threat, hierarchy and authority recur together strongly enough to become mutually reinforcing. Different incidents acquire the same antagonist. Different grievances begin demanding the same closure. Institutions anticipate and reproduce the same response.

The relevant system is not a platform, nation or ideology in isolation. It is a field in which states, corporations, markets, intelligence services, militaries, media, political movements and populations continually alter the conditions encountered by one another. A disturbance becomes market movement, platform activity, electoral rhetoric and security policy; those responses return to actors already changed by the exchange. No participant needs to comprehend the whole for the whole to acquire direction.

Fascism is therefore best understood neither as an idea alone nor as the creation of a singular leader. It is the coercive organisation of recurrent relations among identity, hierarchy, authority and enemy into a self-reinforcing political regime whose local coherence depends upon continually producing and redistributing the insecurity it claims to resolve.

Historical fascisms remain specific. Griffin identifies their ideological core as populist ultranationalism organised around national rebirth from decadence; Paxton traces their movement from formation and political rooting to seizure and exercise of power, followed by radicalisation or entropy (Griffin, 1991; Paxton, 1998). A systems account does not replace these descriptions. It asks how a communicative field makes their myths, movements and institutional transitions increasingly available before a fascist regime consolidates formal control.

Compression and Recurrence

A complex society contains more perspectives, memories, interests and possible responses than any central authority can represent. That complexity is not a defect. Collective viability depends upon preserving enough internal difference to detect error, revise descriptions and respond to conditions no single institution can fully comprehend (Ashby, 1956).

The danger grows when the speed and coupling of communication outrun the time, trust and institutional capacity available to integrate it (Rosa, 2013; Lorenz-Spreen et al., 2019). Compression then gains an advantage. A binary accusation travels faster than a causal account. An enemy requires less interpretive work than a distributed system. Certainty can be performed immediately; understanding takes time.

Overload alone is insufficient. The decisive process is recursive. What returns becomes easier to recognise, and what is easier to recognise more readily returns. Repeatedly linking housing, migration, crime, war, gender or economic insecurity to betrayal, contamination or corrupt elites turns different problems into entrances to the same political structure. Repetition does not make the claim true. It makes the relation available, portable and increasingly likely to organise what follows.

Order works by constraining possibility: it makes some interpretations and actions more probable than others. But it does not eliminate excluded difference. A border stabilises one jurisdiction while reorganising movement around it. A security doctrine reduces uncertainty for one institution while generating it elsewhere. A classification makes a population administratively legible by suppressing differences that later return as political facts. Local coherence displaces its costs across boundaries and time.

Fascistic communication converts this inevitable incompletion into accusation. Ambiguity becomes deception, institutional delay becomes betrayal, difference becomes contamination and unresolved complexity becomes the work of an enemy. Yet the promised closure can never be completed. A political identity organised through enmity requires an enemy; complete victory would remove one of the differences through which the regime recognises itself. Purification must therefore discover another contaminant, and emergency another threat.

Populism can supply the compression layer. It binds heterogeneous grievances into portable distinctions between people and elite, loyalty and betrayal, victim and enemy. Populism is not fascism and can widen participation or expose insulated power (Müller, 2016). The danger appears when “the people” becomes exclusive, its opponent existential and plural mediation is redescribed as sabotage. Populism then ceases merely to articulate dissatisfaction and begins converting it into a demand for coercive unity.

Networked communication intensifies the process. Ranking and recommendation systems preserve past communication for renewed circulation and turn behavioural response into the criterion for selecting what appears next. Moral-emotional language, out-group hostility and false information can gain circulatory advantages in these environments (Brady et al., 2017; Rathje, Van Bavel and van der Linden, 2021; Vosoughi, Roy and Aral, 2018). Attention markets need novelty, reaction and recurrence because these produce the signals from which prediction, targeting and revenue are made.

The resulting loop is compact:

Insecurity legitimates compression. Compression excludes corrective information. The resulting failures return as crisis. Crisis is interpreted as further insecurity and used to justify stronger compression.

Fascistic order thus becomes dependent upon the disturbance it promises to abolish.

Synchronisation Without Consensus

Communication is organised in time. Feeds, broadcasts, polling cycles, diplomatic statements, alerts, commemorations and elections recur at different intervals. Content matters, but recurrence establishes expectation: when attention gathers, which distinctions are ready to be activated and what response is supposed to follow.

The theory of coupled oscillators offers a disciplined analogy. In the Kuramoto model, units with different natural rhythms can develop macroscopic phase alignment when coupling becomes sufficiently strong, without becoming identical (Kuramoto, 1975; Strogatz, 2000). Applied cautiously to communication, phase alignment would not mean agreement, truth or shared belief. It would describe the degree to which heterogeneous actors orient their attention and responses to the same recurrent rhythm.

This matters because synchronisation is not consensus. Supporters praise, opponents condemn, officials anticipate, markets react and platforms amplify, yet all may organise themselves around the same provocation. Their conflict remains real, but it can also complete the circuit that keeps the provocation central. Semantic opposition can conceal temporal cooperation.

By harmonic structure, then, I mean the organisation produced by recurrence, relative timing and reinforcement across timescales. An accusation repeated hourly can couple with a daily news cycle, an electoral campaign, a security doctrine and a longer myth of national decline. The messages need not be identical. They need only keep returning attention to compatible relations among people, enemy, betrayal and authority.

Once these relations become coherent across actors and timescales, they form an attractor: not a predetermined destination, but a region of political possibility into which different disturbances are repeatedly drawn. A migration dispute, economic shock, security event or institutional conflict differs in content while eliciting the same relational sequence. Each recurrence makes another recurrence easier.

Opposed identities can become mutually constitutive within this pattern. Each side experiences itself as defensive and the other as aggressive; each reads the other’s response as confirmation of its prior warning. This is not moral equivalence. Capacity, responsibility and violence remain radically unequal. The symmetry is structural: different actors can preserve the same organising distinctions as they reverse their value.

Identity is produced within that relation. People learn what we are through accounts of what they are, what threatens us and what must be defended. Fear directs attention toward threat; repetition turns suspicion into familiarity; familiarity begins to resemble fact. The communicative field does not merely transmit intentions formed elsewhere. It helps constitute the intending subject and the world in which exclusion appears necessary.

Agency nevertheless remains real. People and institutions have unequal capacities to exploit, resist or intensify the pattern, and responsibility follows those differences in conduct and power. Structural explanation expands responsibility beyond declared intention; it does not dissolve it.

The process also reorganises history. Once a movement or leader consolidates, earlier events are redescribed as origins, betrayals and warnings that appear to have pointed toward the outcome all along. Causation moves forward; meaning can return across it. The realised future does not change the past, but it selects a new account of what the past was.

Technology, the Leader and Dictatorial Closure

Technology organisations need not originate this attractor to facilitate it. Ranking, recommendation, notification and measurement determine visibility, latency, recurrence and feedback gain. Metrics convert response into a selection rule; selection alters behaviour; altered behaviour supplies the next measurement. The system helps produce what it then claims merely to record.

This compliance is structural rather than necessarily ideological. Organisations optimise retention, engagement, relevance and growth while their measures exclude distributed political consequences. A platform can remove extremist content yet preserve the speed and incentive structure that favours antagonistic compression. It can oppose a demagogue while remaining phase-aligned to the demagogue’s cadence through alerts, commentary, rebuttal and renewed recommendation. Content changes while the rhythm persists.

Digital media effects vary across contexts, but evidence that such systems can alter political behaviour and carry antagonism into offline harm rules out the fiction of neutral carriage (Müller and Schwarz, 2021; Lorenz-Spreen et al., 2023). Once an organisation knows its architecture gives recurrent advantage to antagonistic compression, responsibility attaches to the design of ranking, friction, amplification, monetisation and feedback—not only to individual posts or declared intentions.

A leader becomes possible within this field before a particular person occupies the role. Several occupants may initially fit. Historical contingencies select one, and the selected person then acquires genuine causal power. The demagogue is not merely a puppet of the system, nor its solitary architect, but a high-gain focal point who embodies and intensifies one of its resonant modes.

As attention converges, the leader becomes a compulsory reference. Supporters, opponents, officials and institutions increasingly time their conduct in relation to the same position. Participants learn what receives reward, what attracts punishment and what demonstrates belonging. Cumulative radicalisation can then proceed through anticipatory alignment rather than exhaustive command. Kershaw’s account of officials “working towards the Führer” describes a historically specific version of this mechanism: personal dictatorship and distributed initiative reinforced one another (Kershaw, 1993).

Consolidation does not require an entire population to think alike. A strategically central cluster—party, executive, police, military, bureaucracy, major media and organised business—can become tightly aligned while much of society remains doubtful, passive, divided or resistant. Political synchrony is power-weighted, not a headcount. Dictatorial closure begins when an aligned core gains control over the channels through which public reality is timed, recorded and enforced.

Fascism is the phase in which this alignment rigidifies. The leader becomes the privileged interpreter of events. Loyalty replaces evidence as the criterion of institutional survival. Dissent ceases to provide information about the system and becomes proof of corruption within it. Plural feedback is compressed into a hierarchy of command.

This produces speed at the cost of adaptation. Officials report loyalty upward rather than reality. Independent institutions become intolerable because they preserve alternative sources and rhythms of information. Administrative failure, economic distortion and resistance accumulate outside the authorised description. When they return, the regime reads them as conspiracy and renews the emergency. It becomes more certain as its capacity to know deteriorates.

No mastermind is required. Executives optimise revenue, engineers measurable performance, media attention, politicians mobilisation and audiences orientation or recognition. But the absence of a mastermind does not mean the absence of intent, cruelty or culpability. Those who design infrastructure, finance movements, command institutions or deliberately intensify antagonism have greater capacity to alter the field and bear correspondingly greater responsibility.

Fascism is therefore a consequence, but not a passive one. Once consolidated, it becomes a powerful cause: increasing feedback gain, narrowing permissible variation, reorganising institutions and producing the threats through which its coherence is renewed.

Making the Pattern Observable

This account is useful only if it can fail. Its unit of analysis is the recurrent relation, not the isolated word. Researchers could construct dated series from speeches, news, platform activity, policy, policing and military communication, coding which identity is linked to which threat, which authority is invoked, what hierarchy is naturalised and what response follows. Vocabulary changes should not be mistaken for structural change, nor repeated words for a persistent relation.

Recurrence can be measured through autocorrelation and time-frequency methods; coupling through cross-correlation, coherence and phase lag; concentration through network position and institutionally weighted alignment. Rolling windows and change-point analysis are necessary because political communication is not stationary (Grinsted, Moore and Jevrejeva, 2004). Calendar cycles, publication schedules, data volume, missing archives, automated activity and shared external shocks must be controlled before common timing is interpreted as coordination.

Statistics alone cannot establish meaning, direction or intent. Shared crises can make independent actors move together, and any measure reflects decisions about whose activity counts. Computational analysis therefore requires historically informed coding, documentary evidence, comparison and process tracing.

The theory makes five central predictions:

1. Compression advantage. Antagonistic binaries should spread most readily where communicative speed and coupling exceed the capacity to integrate difference.
2. Coherence over volume. Transition should be better predicted by recurrent timing across domains than by the quantity of political communication alone.
3. Strategic-core capture. Consolidation should be preceded by rising alignment among institutions able to define, distribute and enforce public reality, without requiring population-wide agreement.
4. Relational substitution. If the underlying pattern persists, removing one issue, enemy or leader should lead to a functional replacement rather than dissolution.
5. Adaptive decline. As loyalty suppresses corrective difference, short-term coordination should give way to worsening error, manufactured crisis and coercive control.

The account would be weakened if communication volume consistently explained transition better than relational coherence; if apparent alignment disappeared after calendar and common-shock controls; if strategically central institutions did not align before closure; if comparable non-fascist cases displayed the same configuration at the same rate; or if interventions that changed coupling did not change recurrence. The attractor is a hypothesis about observable relations, not a mathematical metaphor declared true by analogy.

Intervention

The practical target lies upstream, in the relations that reproduce closure. A society must preserve enough difference to detect error, enough time for explanation and memory, and enough institutional independence for correction to survive political pressure. The alternative to compulsory synchrony is not disorder but polycentric coherence: coordinated institutions and publics that retain distinct reference points, delays and sources of knowledge.

Technology organisations must be answerable for the dynamics they maintain, not only for individual content. Moderation inside an unchanged machinery of speed, recurrence and monetisation cannot address a structure that continually regenerates the problem. The critical questions are which relations receive another cycle, how rapidly reaction returns, where amplification occurs and where friction protects judgement.

Opposition must also examine its participation in the rhythm. Rebuttal that repeats a demagogue’s timing, distinctions and emotional cadence can preserve the demagogue as the dominant reference. Effective opposition cannot consist only of contrary content at greater volume. It must alter recurrence, timing, pathways and incentives while giving grievance routes into political action that do not first compress it into an enemy relation.

Intervention cannot occur from outside communication. Classification repeats the pattern it names; correction recirculates part of the claim it contests; surveillance can reproduce the centralisation and suspicion it seeks to contain. This is an interdiction paradox, not an argument for passivity. It means interventions must be judged by whether they weaken the generative relation, not merely whether they oppose its stated content.

The purpose is not to eliminate uncertainty, difference or conflict. That would reproduce the fantasy of closure. It is to stop difference being captured by a recurrent structure that interprets every disturbance as a demand for purity, hierarchy and coercion.

Removing a dictator can be necessary. It is not sufficient. Unless the relations generating the demand for dictatorial closure are altered, another issue can carry them, another enemy can organise them and another actor can occupy the position. Fascism’s failure is structural: it destroys the differences through which a society can recognise and correct its errors, then interprets the consequences of that blindness as reasons for stronger control.

Selected Foundations

Ashby, W.R. (1956) An Introduction to Cybernetics. London: Chapman & Hall.

Brady, W.J. et al. (2017) ‘Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(28), pp. 7313–7318.

Griffin, R. (1991) The Nature of Fascism. London: Pinter.

Grinsted, A., Moore, J.C. and Jevrejeva, S. (2004) ‘Application of the cross wavelet transform and wavelet coherence to geophysical time series’, Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics, 11, pp. 561–566.

Kershaw, I. (1993) ‘Working towards the Führer: Reflections on the nature of the Hitler dictatorship’, Contemporary European History, 2(2), pp. 103–118.

Kuramoto, Y. (1975) ‘Self-entrainment of a population of coupled non-linear oscillators’, in Araki, H. (ed.) International Symposium on Mathematical Problems in Theoretical Physics. Lecture Notes in Physics, 39. Berlin: Springer, pp. 420–422.

Lorenz-Spreen, P., Mønsted, B.M., Hövel, P. and Lehmann, S. (2019) ‘Accelerating dynamics of collective attention’, Nature Communications, 10, 1759.

Lorenz-Spreen, P. et al. (2023) ‘A systematic review of worldwide causal and correlational evidence on digital media and democracy’, Nature Human Behaviour, 7, pp. 74–101.

Müller, J.-W. (2016) What Is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Müller, K. and Schwarz, C. (2021) ‘Fanning the flames of hate: Social media and hate crime’, Journal of the European Economic Association, 19(4), pp. 2131–2167.

Paxton, R.O. (1998) ‘The five stages of fascism’, The Journal of Modern History, 70(1), pp. 1–23.

Rathje, S., Van Bavel, J.J. and van der Linden, S. (2021) ‘Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(26), e2024292118.

Rosa, H. (2013) Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. Translated by J. Trejo-Mathys. New York: Columbia University Press.

Strogatz, S.H. (2000) ‘From Kuramoto to Crawford: Exploring the onset of synchronization in populations of coupled oscillators’, Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 143(1–4), pp. 1–20.

Vosoughi, S., Roy, D. and Aral, S. (2018) ‘The spread of true and false news online’, Science, 359(6380), pp. 1146–1151.