The perpetual death of political decorum

Increasingly we have seen the erosion of decorum in politics across the world, exemplified in the behavior of one Donald J. Trump, the current president of the United States. His tactics from the beginning included simply doing whatever he thought he could possibly get away with regardless of how debasing or bizarre it was in order to gain power and support, and boy did it work.

If you‘ve ever played through the Mass Effect trilogy of video games, you may be familiar with the character Javik. He is the last surviving member of a civilization that was exterminated by an enemy that knows neither honor nor mercy, and when he first meets the relatively hopeful player character Commander Shepard, Javik delivers one of the coldest lines ever uttered in a video game: „Stand in the ashes of a trillion dead souls and ask the ghosts if honor matters. The silence is your answer.“

He means this in the sense that their enemies, the reapers, are not going to play by any rules but their own, so it’s naive to think that they can get through this fight with their honor intact, and honor is meaningless if you’re dead. He watched his entire civilization get wiped out. They were a highly militaristic imperial regime that put a lot of value in a sense of honor, and now they are all dead.

About a decade ago, when Trump was on the campaign trail, the democrats decided that they would simply stick to „fighting fair“, exemplified in Barrack Obama‘s „they go low, we go high“ rhetoric that permeated the democratic establishment. Meanwhile Trump was saying and doing insane shit on a near-daily basis that would have ended any other politician’s career. Politics had always been a dirty game, but now it was all in your face, and his supporters loved it.

Fast-forward to today, Trump is now nearly halfway through his second non-consecutive term and looking for ways to eliminate voting entirely to establish himself as a dictator. He has dissolved the US’ soft power on the global stage, there are armed goons roaming the streets snatching up anyone who looks too “foreign”, and the world is on the brink of an oil-crisis-induced recession due to his war of choice in Iran. All this is happening while the democrats are infighting because while a select few of them seem to want actual improvements in people’s material conditions, others are more concerned with how many billions of dollars to send to Israel.

In Iceland, the popularity surge of the Centre party (a misnomer) has been met with tepid resistance, mostly in the form of holier-than-thou fact-checks and lengthy Facebook thinkpieces. It stems from a type of normalcy bias that we’ve seen from both the media and government officials. But here’s the problem: No one in the Centre party cares about reality and neither do their supporters. Fact checking is largely preaching to the choir. Most of those watching know that they’re full of shit, the partisan difference lies in whether they approve of their shit-fullness or not. Their supporters don’t care that they are lying about poor people, immigrants or queer people, they just want them to not exist, while the opposition displays righteous outrage at their brazenness.

Pointing out their hypocrisy will fail miserably too. Nothing they say or do is meant to be applied equally to everyone, just their perceived enemies. They are a fascist movement, and the only real fascist value is domination. They will say and do anything to attain more power over others, no matter how debasing it looks to a sane person. Their rhetoric is currently being fine-tuned for their audience, and when parliamentary election season comes around in about two years, I fear they will have fully done so.

Currently there are campaigns ongoing for the municipal elections in mid-May, and the Center party's youth organization has released some chud-coded campaign ads. One of the more notable ones lately being one where a young man exits a voting facility and punches a “liberal” in the face. The video is rooted in both video game and meme culture and is obviously meant to appeal to those of the younger generation who have lost their minds on the platform formerly known as Twitter. I secretly hope that they will fly too close to the sun and release a video that’s far too internet-poisoned and esoteric for even their most rabidly batshit supporters, akin to how Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis released a nazi-themed shitpost video when he was running for president in 2024. It’s unlikely, but not impossible.

The use of social media in political campaigns has historically been a winning tactic. In 2024, then presidential candidate Halla Tómasdóttir actively used short-form videos on social media to reach a wide audience of young people. She is now the president. If the other parties in Iceland want to have a real chance of fighting them, they need to resort to dirtier tactics. The Center party has been at conventions hosted by Turning Point Action to learn the tactics of the American far-right, so they are not going to play by the rules that the other parties religiously follow. Nobody should emerge from this fight without blood under their fingernails and flesh between their teeth.

What matters most at the end of the day is the material effect of policies and actions. Fascists’ only real goal is to cause harm to their enemies. They know no mercy, they have no honor or dignity and they will readily debase themselves if it means they gain more power. If they win, they could tear apart communities, they could tear apart families, and they could ruin the lives of those who fight for a better and more equitable society. Fascists have no vision of a better world, they know only violence, be it in the form of legislative oppression of groups they dislike, or direct physical assault fueled by their rhetoric.

As some others who have looked upon the coming tsunami of fascism, my mind is brought back to a research paper from 2011 titled “The Evolution of Overconfidence” by Dominic Johnson and James Fowler. They posit that overconfidence can be a favorable trait when it comes to survival in nature. If two animals are vying for the same piece of food, the one that’s more aggressive and confident is often more likely to scare the other one away from it, letting them get the food without a fight. Fascists always go for the food. That’s why they have gained so much power elsewhere. They show confidence that scares the opposition into submission.

I fully believe that there is still hope, but some tactics need to be taken back to the drawing board. You can’t reason with fascists, you beat them, and the people themselves are rarely as scary as the mask they wear. Their confidence can be their own downfall if the opposition dares to simply go for it. They need to be met with resistance on all fronts, not just in the political institutions. Regular citizens need to do their part, small as it may seem, to make things harder for them. Even petty things like calling them at all hours of the night or just being maliciously incompetent when it comes to something they need from you (or even competent in some cases). Even just wasting their time is real political praxis.

We have a bad habit of seeing politics as something that just happens around us, but we have a say in it. Not just with our votes, but with our actions. That’s democracy. That’s how we win.