Why does Fascism come and go?

Early in periods of social stress, small elite-seeking minority groups gain disproportionate power. These groups are not defined by race or ethnicity, but by their orientation toward hierarchy, exemption, and control. Historically, in the United States, this elite structure has repeatedly imposed catastrophic harm on Native American and Black communities, not as an accident, but as a method of consolidation.

For many populations, continuity was never protected. It was systematically destroyed.

Those atrocities are not peripheral to the system. They are proof of how it works.

Elite hierarchies organize early, tolerate rigid authority, simplify narratives, and deploy DARVO mechanisms to deny harm, attack critics, and reverse victimhood. Racism functions within this structure as a tool: it divides, dehumanizes, and redirects blame downward, away from concentrated power.

Most people, across racial and cultural lines, delay coordination because daily life still functions unevenly. Work continues for some. Institutions appear stable for others. Organizing feels risky, exhausting, or morally compromised. This delay is not indifference to injustice. It reflects how thoroughly hierarchy fragments shared reality.

That delay holds until continuity is threatened broadly enough that it can no longer be compartmentalized.

When people recognize that their ability to plan a future, rely on law, maintain bodily autonomy, or trust social predictability is collapsing across groups, coordination accelerates rapidly. What once felt like isolated injustice becomes legible as a shared structural threat. Latent capacity surfaces.

At that point, elite authoritarian advantage collapses. Their power depends on fear asymmetry, narrative control, and fragmented resistance. Emergency mass coordination breaks those conditions. Narratives fracture. Compliance reverses. Structures built to dominate segmented populations fail when confronted by distributed refusal.

This is not moral redemption and it is not justice for past atrocities. Those harms do not vanish or resolve cleanly. Damage remains uneven. Recovery is unequal. Trust takes generations.

But the system itself loses viability.

The pattern recurs not because racism is newly abundant, but because hierarchical elites repeatedly attempt to preserve dominance by recycling denial, reversal, and scapegoating. When that machinery becomes visible as machinery rather than myth, its effectiveness collapses.

The danger is not naming racism. The danger is mistaking it for the root instead of recognizing it as a weapon used by those who seek collective power without accountability.

The outcome, when correction comes, is rarely triumph. It is containment, constraint, and long, incomplete repair.