Internal fascism is horrifying because its agents are familiar ordinary people

Evidence

The horror of the society that flips fascist from within—without the aid of a foreign invasion—lies precisely in this unsettling feeling of familiarity. When that ferocious force is conjured up to wage war on a portion of the domestic population, there are no outsiders to blame. It’s the nice, normal people down the street who turn out to be capable of monstrosity—monstrousness is revealed as the evil twin of nice, the doppelganger of normal. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 436

Categorization

• XREF: This ‘evil twin of nice’ formulation distills the doppelganger device: the thesis that the far right is metabolizing what the left abandoned, so it wears familiar faces. — connects to: Fascism’s cohesion rests on overt terror, not just psychic compliance — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 495