Fascism and Bad Faith

Cultural Shifts Always Feel Permanent

For both better and worse, they are not.

The ad blasts off your TV screen and tells you in no uncertain terms that the fascist boot is here, on your neck, and you have no choice but to embrace it, to enjoy it, for it might not be so bad after all.

It’s a Ram Truck ad and it’s on my TV constantly because I consume lots of sportsball and sportsball enjoyers are assumed by big corporations to be something just north of troglodytes. Me watch ball, me have mental health hinge on results of sportsball, me love country. So it makes sense that this Ram commercial blares from my TV, starting with a line that would have been rejected from the script of Idiocracy: “Americans, we can do anything we want, except one thing: We just can’t stop being American.”

“Since that revolution they said we’d lose” – who “they” are is unclear – “we just couldn’t choose to stop being American.”

Cut to grim-faced George Washington driving a Ram truck through a battle field as panicked redcoats scatter.

America’s hottest club is Fash, as Stefon might say. This club has it all: Red, white, and blue smoke pouring from the back of red, white, and blue Ram trucks; red, white, and blue smoke pouring from the tails of fighter jets; monster trucks soaring through the air, a fucking bald eagle; guys with zoomer-style mullets wearing tuxedos; weary grandmothers with tattoo sleeves; an astronaut on the moon; a guy playing the Star Spangled Banner on electric guitar; cowboy boots and cowboy hats and cowboys boots and cowboy hats, and just when you think you couldn’t get enough cowboy boots or hats, there they are: More fucking cowboys boots and hats.

The Ram ad is brutally clear, it leaves no room for interpretation: Fascism is here, baby, so get comfortable and buy our truck and be a goddamn American because that’s the only thing to be now. We watched every single swing state go to the guy promising an ending to American self governance. We know what you want. You told us what you want, and you could not be any fucking clearer. You want the boot and you want it now.

Our Shitty (Temporary) Right-Wing Moment

I don’t get out much. Maybe you knew that after years of reading BFT blog posts written by a work-from-home husband and dad. When I do get out of the house, I take in everything, I notice everything, much more than I did in the Before Times when I worked at an office and went out with friends and did all the social things we used to do as a society. I attended a concert in DC a couple weeks ago – as you know by now – and was overwhelmed by the cultural turn reflected on every woman’s feet.

Thousands and thousands of women – teenagers, 20-somethings, middle-aged folks – were dressed up in their best cowboy apparel for this Lumineers concert (I’m not a huge fan but thought it’d be a nice night out with my wife and her family). I had been to a Lumineers concert back in 2016, about 60 days before Trump won the first time. No one, I can report, was wearing cowboy boots. No one there looked like they were frontiersman blazing a path west, embracing the white man’s burden of civilizing barbarians along the way. In September 2025, eight months into Trump’s second term, things were different. The entire crowd looked like Yellowstone extras (the popularity of Yellowstone was truly a harbinger of Things to Come).

It was jarring and fascinating, weird and revealing. Someone from On High in the fashion world, maybe during a cocktail party chat with an ad agency executive who made the Ram Truck commercial, decided we had taken not one step to the right, but rather ten steps to the right with Trump’s return to power. We have never loved fascism more than we do now. It was time to dress up as the most American character there is, a settler.

And so on a rainy night in the nation’s capital, occupied by gun-toting soldiers dispatched by the mad king, untold thousands of people wore their best settler outfits to watch the Lumineers play their anthems to a packed house. Back in September 2016, the Lumineers made a point to tell the crowd to vote for HIllary Clinton and cautioned against the dangers represented in Trump’s platform, as much as he’s ever had one. This time around there was no acknowledgement of our sinking into the jaws of authoritarianism. I understand why. Public criticism of the regime is effectively illegal. It won’t always be this way but that’s how it is today. The Lumineers got the message. Everyone has.

It all reminds me of the months and years after 9/11, when every part of American culture served as a mirror to the fear and hatred that would manifest into anti-constitutional policy making that was always going to make us vulnerable to a mad king who recognizes no limits to his power. Everywhere you looked in 2001 and 2002 and really, all the way into the Obama era, relayed one simple message: We’ve lurched to the right, whether you like it or not, and we're never going back.

Tune in Monday nights to watch Jack Bauer torture people and commit extrajudicial executions with the best interests of his dear country at heart.

Watch one of America’s most popular country acts get banned from the airwaves for suggesting the president’s illegal wars were not actually good.

Read about the comedian losing his TV show because he said the wrong thing about the 9/11 attacks.

Today feels more like 2003 – the height of post-9/11 hysteria with the launch of the Iraq war – than any time since. This – what you're experiencing today – is the supercharged version, fueled by two decades of letting the computer make us mentally ill. The shift feels as enduring and permanent today as it did back then, when no one in public life could safely critique the Constitution-shredding boy king.

Maybe the strangest part of the cultural rightward jump that started in 2024 is that four short years before that, the culture had made an unprecedented move to the left. Amid the disorientation of the COVID shutdowns and a racial justice reckoning fomenting in every corner of the nation, TV ads suddenly reflected a multicultural utopia: Brown and black women of various body shapes were front and center in many of these ads, people of indeterminate sex or gender popped up here and there, interracial couples were seemingly everywhere on your TV. It was 2020, society was pulling apart at the seams, nothing seemed real, everyone was more online and drunk than they’d ever been, and a diverse cast of Americans were suddenly selling your favorite products, even the high-end ones. HBO aired Watchmen, perhaps the most unapologetically woke show in TV history – a show that could not be made today, just three years later.

The left had finally won the culture war. It had taken longer than we thought but the fighting had concluded. There were no more battles to wage. It was over. Walmart had queer folks in their ads. Oil companies loved the environment. A trans person was hawking Bud Light.

Only it wasn’t over, not even close. The American right became a rattling, screaming teapot in those years, with a Democratic president and their temporarily dethroned king hiding away in Florida, patiently waiting for the hijacked Supreme Court to pave the way for his glorious return to power. The right’s rage built slowly at first, then quickly. They promised revenge for having to see those Walmart ads, for having their cars sold to them by black women. When they were in charge, we'd all pay for these sins. And so we have: Fascist podcasters run the American government today with all the incompetence and meanness and idiocy you'd expect from deeply unqualified people driven insane by the internet who got their jobs only because they promised the mad king to deliver vengeance for the COVID/BLM era. They bared their teeth and said they would get the job done. They would force us to regret that blip of cultural progressivism. Part of that regret would include watching Walton Goggins dressed up as a cowboy, line dancing in a Walmart commercial. Our punishment knows no bounds.

No cultural turn is permanent. One day no one will wear cowboy boots and hats and it won't be cool to embrace an American fascist aesthetic. I guess I've lived long enough to know that for certain. In the meantime, when this lurch to the right feels permanent, when you can't escape the fascist messaging assaulting you from your TV screen, know that your fellow Americans don't care for the people in charge. In fact, they fucking hate what's going on today and they regret their small parts in opening the gates to such vile people.

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