Fascism as a Cultural Prion: The Structural Mechanics of Institutional Necrosis

Introduction: The Pathogen, Not the Politics

Conventional political science frequently lacks the taxonomical precision to categorize modern authoritarianism because it treats fascism as an ideology—a coherent set of doctrines regarding state, economy, and society. This is a category error. Fascism is not an ideology; it is a pathological cultural operating system. More precisely, it functions as a cultural prion: a self-replicating, host-agnostic misfold of social cognition that corrupts the interpretive machinery of any society it colonizes.

Like a biological prion, which is content-minimal (a mere misfolded protein) yet function-destroying, this cultural pathogen does not require a sophisticated manifesto. It is host-agnostic and content-minimal, capable of overwriting diverse political traditions by replacing shared reality with a closed loop of mythic identity and ritualized grievance. It requires only a specific cognitive distortion—a misfolding of identity and threat perception—that, once activated, induces the same misfold in adjacent social structures. It is resistant to standard democratic “antibodies” like fact-checking or debate because it operates at the level of epistemic trust, not empirical reality. To understand the collapse of modern pluralism, we must map the mechanics of this infection and the specific vulnerabilities of the technological and institutional hosts it now colonizes.

Section I: The Cognitive Misfold

The metamorphosis of a pluralistic social topology into a necrotic state follows a distinct, replicable sequence of structural degradation. This is not a slide into “conservatism” or “populism,” but a structural atrophy of the collective capacity to process reality—a literal misfolding of the social protein.

1. Identity Compression: The sequence begins with the structural collapse of social identity. Complex, multidimensional affiliations (vocation, faith, geography, hobby) are crushed into a single, mythic axis (e.g., “the People” vs. “the Traitors”). This is the primary misfold: the reduction of a high-dimensional social topology into a flat, binary line.
2. Threat Amplification: This flattened identity is immediately framed as existentially endangered. The prion hijacks the host’s survival circuitry, recoding every external stimulus as a lethal threat. Deliberation is replaced by a permanent state of emergency, making the misfold self-reinforcing.
3. Enemy Simplification: To sustain the misfold, the “Other” must be stripped of nuance. All opposition is aggregated into a single, monolithic contaminant. This represents the collapse of social empathy into a logic of * *algorithmic triage**, where the complexity of the adversary is replaced by the simplicity of a pathogen.
4. Authority Rebinding: As trust in pluralistic, error-correcting institutions (courts, science, journalism) is dissolved by the perceived threat, epistemic trust is rebound to a singular, “unfolded” source of truth—a leader or a mythic narrative. The host no longer processes reality; it merely mirrors the prion’s internal logic.
5. Institutional Necrosis: Finally, the society’s cognitive tissue—its norms of adjudication, verification, and compromise—undergoes structural decay. The institutions that once managed complexity now only facilitate the misfold. Violence is no longer seen as a violation of order, but as a “cleansing” metabolic necessity to purge the perceived infection.

Section II: Fascism 2.0 and the Techbro Stack

Historically, fascism required mass mobilization—bodies in the street, labor in the factories. The modern mutation, however, has fused with the “Techbro-Fascist Stack,” evolving into Fascism as a Platform. This is not merely a political movement using social media; it is the transformation of the state into a proprietary operating system that manages the population through the logic of the “stack.”

At the core of this platform is Algorithmic Necropolitics, a system that optimizes for elite continuity through * *managed obsolescence**, rendering large swaths of the population redundant. Unlike 20th-century fascism, which sought to harness the energy of the masses, Fascism 2.0 transitions from active mobilization to “letting die by design.” Through predictive risk-scoring, automated resource withdrawal, and the algorithmic throttling of social support, the system identifies and erases “inefficient” or “non-compliant” populations. This is the logic of automated disposability: the state no longer needs to kill its enemies if it can simply optimize them out of existence.

This creates the Biopolitical Paradox: the weaponization of demographic panic to build an infrastructure that discards the very base it claims to protect. The regime uses narratives of existential threat (e.g., the “Great Replacement”) to mobilize a base of white grievance, yet the “Techbro Stack” it constructs is designed to render that base—the traditional working class—economically redundant and socially disposable. It is a system of “post-labor optimization” where the elite no longer require a loyal population, only a compliant and surveilled one. The prion has evolved: it no longer needs a charismatic leader to command death; it simply needs a dashboard to optimize it.

Section III: The Fragile Backstop

In the United States, the “immune system” against this pathogen relied on specific institutional barriers: the Judiciary and the Military Legal corps (JAG). Both have suffered critical failures.

The erosion of the JAG corps represents a catastrophic loss of internal filtration—a systemic de-professionalization accelerated by the 2025 JAG Purge. Following the controversial operations in Venezuela and Greenland, the administration moved to eliminate what Secretary Hegseth explicitly termed “legal roadblocks” to executive action. This was not merely a personnel change but a structural lobotomy. The military’s adherence to the rule of law relies on * *epistemic intermediaries—legal officers who translate political directives into lawful orders. By purging senior counsel who insisted on constitutional fidelity, the regime triggered the **“Resign if Unlawful” Trap.

This trap functions as a self-sorting mechanism for institutional necrosis: ethical officers, faced with orders that violate international law or domestic statutes, choose resignation as their final act of protest. While morally consistent, this mass exodus creates a vacuum filled by “opportunistic compliers.” The result is Institutional Fragmentation and Paralysis: without a unified legal standard, the burden of constitutional interpretation shifts to individual commanders. This creates a patchwork of compliance, where some units operate under the rule of law while others function as paramilitary extensions of the executive. The military ceases to be a cohesive instrument of the state and becomes a fragmented collection of fiefdoms, paralyzed by legal ambiguity and internal distrust.

Simultaneously, the Supreme Court has undergone Jurisprudential Capture, a specific form of Authority Rebinding that transforms the Court from an adjudicator of law into a primary vector for the pathogen. This shift has moved the Court’s role from preserving democratic procedure to protecting the mythic identity of the “pure” people against perceived contaminants. By prioritizing the survival of this “unfolded” identity over the integrity of the constitutional framework, the Court has rendered itself an unreliable backstop for democratic norms. When the final arbiter of truth adopts the prion’s logic, the legal immune system does not merely fail; it actively facilitates the necrosis of the state.

Section IV: The Power Cost Curve Framework

The survival of a necrotic regime depends on a calculation of utility. Authoritarianism is not a permanent state but a high-maintenance equilibrium. If the prion cannot be debated away and the institutional immune system has failed, the strategy must shift from persuasion to the Power Cost Curve.

The Power Cost Curve posits that a regime yields only when the cumulative economic, reputational, and operational costs of maintaining control exceed the perceived costs of relinquishing it. Resistance, therefore, is the systematic application of pressure across four strategic axes designed to steepen this curve and induce structural insolvency:

1. Strategic Decoupling (The Financial and Security Axis): The regime relies on the complicity of capital and the loyalty of the security apparatus. Resistance must make continued alignment with the regime a liability. This involves targeted divestment, international sanctions, and the reputational “poisoning” of collaborators. When the cost of being associated with the regime—measured in lost market access, frozen assets, and social ostracization—outweighs the benefits of state patronage, the elite consensus fractures.
2. Bureaucratic Friction (The Institutional Drag Axis): Even a captured state requires a functioning bureaucracy to project power. Institutional drag is the practice of “malicious compliance”—using the regime’s own rules, procedures, and red tape to slow its momentum. By maximizing friction within administrative, legal, and technical systems, resistance forces the regime to expend disproportionate energy on basic governance, draining its resources and focus.
3. Mass Resistance (The Economic and Social Axis): This is the disruption of “business as usual.” Large-scale, non-violent mobilization—strikes, boycotts, and mass civil disobedience—serves to break the illusion of normalization. By halting the flow of commerce and public life, mass resistance imposes a direct economic tax on the regime’s stability, making the “peace” of authoritarianism more expensive than the “chaos” of transition.
4. Distributed Sovereignty (The Networked Resilience Axis): To survive the regime’s attempts to “optimize” populations out of existence, resistance must build redundant, post-permissioned civic structures. This includes parallel systems for information sharing, mutual aid, and distributed sovereignty. Networked resilience lowers the cost of resistance for the individual by providing a safety net outside of state control, while simultaneously demonstrating that the regime is no longer the sole provider of social order.

By synchronizing these four axes, the resistance transforms the state from a profitable enterprise into a bankrupting liability. The goal is not to win a single battle, but to make the continued existence of the regime a mathematical impossibility.

Conclusion: The Architecture of Resistance

Fascism as a cultural prion is a terrifying diagnosis because it exposes the fragility of our cognitive and social structures. It reveals that our institutions are not walls, but collective agreements that can be rewritten by a sufficiently contagious narrative.

However, understanding the mechanics of the misfold provides the blueprint for the cure. We do not fight a prion with arguments; we fight it by altering the epistemic environment in which it replicates. This requires the construction of post-permissioned civic infrastructure—redundant systems of communication, mutual aid, and adjudication that do not rely on state approval or the goodwill of the tech-elite. By decoupling survival from the “stack,” we create the * *structural resilience** necessary to withstand the regime’s attempts at algorithmic erasure and post-labor optimization.

The path forward is not found in a return to the status quo, but in the systematic application of the Power Cost Curve. By raising the economic, operational, and reputational costs of control, we transform the necrotic state from a tool of elite continuity into a bankrupting liability. The regime ends not when it is defeated in debate, but when the cost of its maintenance exceeds the utility of its existence.