Against Fascism Part One: Fascism Rising
So, I have kind of been dreading writing his entry, but it’s been one that I’ve been mulling over for a couple of years now and attempting to tackle for months. I hardly think I am alone in finding myself reading more works of political analysis than I ever have before over the last four years, in an attempt to make sense of what’s happening in the world, and specifically in my own nation of the United States of America.
Every time I get a little farther in writing this, though, the situation seems to deteriorate in a way that I never would have thought I would see in this country.
After the shocking, horrifying, and deadly events last Wednesday at the United States Capitol, when we watched a mob of insurrectionists inspired by the President of the United States attempt a coup to overthrow the democratically elected government, I was left unsure how to proceed. Earlier, I was going to be a little more oblique but I think we must be clear; in any academic definition of the word, Trump has brought fascism into the mainstream in the US.
I perhaps would not have believed it could have gotten so bad, but I can’t say the violence at the capitol was entirely unexpected for me. Reading the selection of books I will discuss in this entry and the next one has given me a good background to understand what happened on January 6th and recommend the majority of them to gain an understanding of the political undercurrents that have come out in recent years. It was darkly interesting to see some of the same names I’d been reading about in works such as Vegas Tenold’s Everything You Love Will Burn, the Proud Boys discussed in Alexandra Minna Stern’s Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate, and fascist activist Nick Fuentes as discussed in Talia Lavin’s Culture Warlords pop up in last week’s coup attempt. It felt like a bit of a horrible pop quiz for me picking them out in the reports.
Over the past few years, I poured through a pile of books attempting to define what really makes fascism what it is, others focusing on the racism and weird mystical beliefs they often share, and some focusing on how to fight against it. All together, they made the events last Wednesday feel like the logical result of the current state of far-right political discourse, if not any less shocking. As I read, the escalation of rhetoric, and of violence, only grew, punctuating my readings.
The danger felt a lot closer to home in 2020 here in Saint Paul, as neo-fascists of various types infiltrated receptive space among anti-lockdown protesters and “stop the steal” rallies, many at the Minnesota State Capitol or at the Governor’s Residence mere blocks from where I live. A group calling itself the “Patriot Front” stickered their insignia and messages a stone’s throw away from my home in May, and again earlier last month. Swastika toting white nationalists stalking through my neighborhood? This is the dark undercurrent that has erupted into the worst attack on the US Capitol since 1814.
It also feels like so many were not ready to believe the true extent of the fascist influence throughout American society in recent years. The feeble reaction of the capitol police may perhaps be an example of this, did they not expect that these “normal, upstanding white men’’ wouldn’t do anything like attempt to overthrow the government, in contrast to their brutal response to peaceful BLM protests last summer? The pathetic reactions of law enforcement in the face of these rioters were probably the most unbelievable aspect of the whole thing to me, watching as they barely resisted a violent attack on the very Capitol building of the United States, except for shooting dead one unarmed woman. President-Elect Biden’s mealy-mouthed platitudes about “honor,” and “dignity,” and how “this isn’t us” didn’t exactly inspire confidence in me, either.
How long has this dark reckoning been brewing? It can be difficult to believe.
The ten works I’ll be talking about through the rest of this article were informative, if chilling, glimpses into the political ideas behind the fascist way of thinking. All in all, each provided a lot of food for thought, concern, horror, and even a little hope. I found them very useful introductions to delving into the contradictory, deeply complicated political labyrinth of fascism, and how it can infect and spread its ideas in plain sight, despite a history of genocide and war.
Fascism is a difficult concept to define specifically, after all, all too easy to just use as shorthand for “everything I disagree with personally.” After years of pop culture depicting rebellious teens calling their parents and teachers “fascists” and conservative attempts to factiously reverse the accusations by claiming “liberals/antifa are the real fascists!” one can understand the hesitancy of “serious” commentators to level claims of fascism on contemporary groups. Online cliches like Godwin’s Law exist for a reason, but as much online discourse becomes poisoned by irony, blurry in intent, it has been easier than ever for fascist sentiment to slip in as conditions worsen. No matter where on the political spectrum you fall, it seems, the feeling that something is wrong with our current neoliberal order is evident.
Politics have always been complicated, but in a world growing increasingly opaque through information overload, the definition of fascism shifts disturbingly, treacherously. The specious but common conservative reasoning that “liberalism”* is a form of fascism because “liberalism” is socialism and socialism is fascism bumps up uncomfortably with occasional hard left pronouncements of “scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds.”* Not to say that the latter is somehow equivalent to the former, only the first seems to be affecting policy in the here and now. Still, it serves to show how muddied the waters can be, leading to some confusing contradictions, contradictions that can be taken advantage of by people attempting to mask their motives.
So, it may be useful to attempt a quick definition of Fascism, a concept that is notoriously difficult to pin down, almost by design. One of the best concise definitions comes from the American political scientist Robert Paxton in his 2004 work, The Anatomy of Fascism, in which Paxton writes -
“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
In piercing this shroud of convoluted elements and providing the tools to recognize and reject the tenants of fascism, each of these authors worked well together. It was interesting to see just how well each book I read complimented and expanded on the next, focusing on certain topics or building on each other’s arguments, though not necessarily in tandem. It is just an interesting comment on contemporary life that so many historians, journalists, philosophers, and other writers found themselves discussing similar things. The question remains, though, does one need to read a dozen works to know that white supremacy and authoritarianism masking itself as liberty remains a problem in the United States? It may be the optimist in me, but I do feel that having a greater understanding of this confusing and occasionally nigh incomprehensible rot in our society may aid us to reject it and make better choices.
In this entry and the next, I’ll discuss some of the titles I recommend to improve your understanding of these frightening topics (though having more knowledge will certainly not make things less frightening). First, I’ll talk about a few works that specifically attempt to discuss what the political idea of fascism actually is and how we can identify it, including its fuzziness and its tentacles that can appear to defy easy definitions. Why, for instance, did the Nazi party call itself the National Socialists despite being so vehemently opposed to the ideas of Socialism?
Next, I’ll talk about works that focus in detail on the dark connotations of fascist belief, namely extreme racism, sexism, homophobia, and antisemitism, strains of hatred that have proven useful to them to exert their autocratic ambitions.
Finally, in my next entry, I will discuss opposition to fascism, specifically “antifa” and how those who hope to counter the rise of fascism view their opposition. Then, I’ll round things out by delving a little into the weirdness and mysticism that also seems to emanate from fascist beliefs.
A good place to begin, I think, is the late Umberto Eco’s short essay Ur-Fascism or Eternal Fascism, first published by the New York Review of Books in 1995. One of my favorite authors, I feel that Eco’s first-hand experiences as a child in Mussolini’s Italy give him an evocative background to sketch out the various aspects and features that can be present in fascist movements across the world and across time. Rereading it, I recalled how I didn’t understand the prescient aspects of the work, but that it now provides a critical platform for the rest of the works I will be discussing through the rest of this discussion. In particular the idea of fascism as being a “fuzzy totalitarianism” drawing in contradictory elements, like combining a “cult of tradition” with a desire to overthrow the current order. These contradictions require an essential syncretistic nature, appropriating ideas from all over the philosophical spectrum based on adaptation to the current environment and climate. Readily available online, Ur-Fascism is a prerequisite to understanding fascist thought, and it is a compact, quick read.
In Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump, Journalist David Neiwert writes what I feel is a good place to begin my discussion of the rest of the contemporary works I read, serving as a good bridge from what I discussed in my entry on the so-called “Economic Anxiety” of the “white working class” in the United States. The titles I collected there illustrate how the general public has been convinced that they are on their own, that they can expect no help from the state or the community. Along with longstanding cultural beliefs that everyone gets only what they deserve, the fact that so many work desperately hard only for things to continue to get worse, there must be a reason, and that reason must be that there are other people who are taking what they do not deserve.
Neiwert writes a broad but detailed, highly readable account of the wax and wane of the American far-right over the past few decades, bringing to light a lot of disturbing information. Published back in 2017, barely a year into Trump’s presidency, he lays out the political landscape that laid the groundwork for his election, illustrating how the extreme fringes of the conservative movement, the white nationalists, militia members, and other extreme reactionaries moved closer and closer to the mainstream.
Arranged in a generally chronological discussion, beginning with the growth of the militia movement during the 1990s to the birth of the Tea Party, and the origins of what became the Alt-Right, Neiwert does a great job tying these threads together. What he terms the “eliminationist” rhetoric of more mainstream right-wing pundits like Rush Limbaugh, opining that perhaps the world would just be better off without liberals, who are giving “handouts’’ to the undeserving. This dehumanizing rhetoric is something that comes up again and again in these works. Neiwert makes clear the way that this rhetoric can open room for racist and fascist ideas to insert themselves, and begin to make strides into the Republican party as a whole.
Delving more deeply into these contradictory ideas that mark fascist ideology and the tactics its followers use to infiltrate a democratic society, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, by philosopher Jason Stanley, is a concise, useful resource. It is, I think, one of the most accessible and informative works for demonstrating just what “fascism” is and just how it has come to play such a scary role in mainstream politics in the United States and elsewhere. Focusing specifically on fascist politics and the tactics they use to cloak their intentions and build power, Stanley describes how the ideology changes and adapts through time, to each situation and location. From nationalism to Fascism is, as he writes, “not a new threat, but a permanent temptation.”
In particular, I felt that Stanley’s arguments were strongest in his descriptions of fascism’s contradictory use of “freedom of speech” in their quest to subvert it, especially as polarization makes it impossible to determine a joint reality. Also, he makes some interesting points in illustrating how fascism, despite its “anti-capitalist” rhetoric weaponizes the very meritocratic mythology described by Neiwert. All in all, it was a great place to start delving into what it is that exactly constitutes historical and contemporary fascism and how it continues to take advantage of tensions in modern liberal democracies to advance its totalitarian goals.
Taking a look further afield at the situation in Europe, Italian-born French academic Enzo Traverso’s short but dense work, The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right, packs a lot of insight into a relatively slim package. Slightly more academic than Neiwert and Stanley’s work, the writing can be a little dry (though translation from French may affect this as well), but it is a rigorous analysis of specific French, Italian, German, and Spanish fascist history.
I found Traverso’s interpretations of how fascist ideas have changed over the twentieth and twenty-first century to be most relevant and thought-provoking. Evolving to what Traverso calls “post-fascism,” a contemporary form of authoritarianism responding to contemporary concerns, not merely a neo-fascist attempt to recreate past movements. This attempt to discuss the present as a historical moment in itself is very interesting, and one I’d like to see more of. All in all, I’m not sure I’d recommend The New Face of Fascism as an introduction to the topic, but it would be a great resource for coursework or a bibliographic review.
Another troubling aspect of fascism is its deep syncretism, drawing elements from across the political spectrum to appeal to various groups, hide in more sympathetic rhetoric, co-opting the language of the left and the center to turn it against them or each other.
A fascinating and informative exploration of the complexities of fascist rhetoric spreading covertly into other ideological groups across the world, Against the Fascist Creep is an important resource. Academic Alexander Reid Ross writes a complex, exhaustive account of the syncretistic and contradictory tendencies of fascism that allow it to infiltrate the “mainstream and radical subcultures” alike, stringently sourced and cited.
From “third positionism” (i.e, “beyond” socialism or capitalism but really an attempt to meld racist ethnonationalism to economically leftist ideas) to “National Bolshevism,” Ross delves deeply into the spaces where fascism “creeps” into other movements historically. Whether appealing to ideas of environmentalism or appropriating anti-capitalist sentiments, far-right actors draw upon ideas from throughout the political spectrum both to muddy the waters and to delegitimize left-wing beliefs.
During a time when the disaffected from all over the political map can see that contemporary discourse in many countries is broken, when people with entirely different motives reach the same conclusions, things can become difficult to parse, particularly on the fringe. Far more than a simplistic “horseshoe theory” analysis placing the radical right on the same footing as the radical left to prioritize centrism, I think Ross makes a strong argument demonstrating how fascism capitalizes on certain tensions to advance their goals. I think it is important to consider that claiming an “anti-capitalist” stance does not mean that one is not racist at the same time.
It is, all in all, a complicated mess of contracting elements and strange fringe actors, so I don’t think I would recommend Against the Fascist Creep is a good place to begin, but Ross really breaks some interesting ground here for those looking to delve deeper into the messy places where fascism can sneak.
After these works parsing definitions of fascism and how it has returned to relevance in the contemporary political arena, some of the most interesting books I read over this project were the ones discussing specifically the specters of racism and white supremacy that fuels much of the resurgence.
Historian Alexandra Minna Stern’s work Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination is a useful and gripping next step from Ross’s work, delving deeper into the white nationalism that fuels the resurgence. Also, she examines the role of virulent misogyny and nationalism, exploring the complex groups that form the “alt-right” and how they interact with each other and with more mainstream groups.
Stern uses the term “metapolitics” to describe how these groups code their beliefs to confuse the politically naive, insidiously blurring their racist goals regarding the “right/left” paradigm, appealing, for instance, to environmentalism or “social change.” Most interestingly, she spends much time describing the far right’s preoccupations with a nostalgic past and a utopic future, blending the two into what one French rightist Guillaume Fayer called “archeofuturism,” in which the white race can achieve freedom from “weaker races.” Horrifying stuff.
This fascist interest in mythology, of a glorious lost past and a future returning to it, “making America great again,” you could say, is a running theme throughout Stern’s research. Fascist use of cutting edge communication technologies are another very important topic she discusses well, as idealogues used the internet to ferment their metapolitical goals. Like Against the Fascist Creep, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate is a fairly academic work that packs a lot of information, citations, and bibliographic resources. Great for an in-depth look at this complex and difficult subject, a little less for a fast-paced introduction to these topics.
British journalist Angela Saini’s book Superior: The Return of Race Science is a topical and darkly fascinating read. Saini sketches out a readable and informative history of how the idea of scientific racism has evolved throughout the decades, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how it continues to inform the social theories of the right-wing today.
I first became aware of the euphemism “race realism” around 2012 and became profoundly disturbed that such beliefs still existed on the online fringes, though Saini deftly illustrates not only how such beliefs survived through the post World War II years through various academic groups, but how they influence political policies of inequality. She puts together a very readable and disturbing account of the scientific evolution of genetics and how certain fringe ideas have persisted and bled into political ideology, blurring science with pseudoscience to advance agendas arguing for eugenics and the all-importance of the IQ in predicting human worth. Genetics and “race” provide a ready-made explanation for everything fascists argue for, hierarchy and the fears that enemies both “too strong” and “too weak” (going back to Eco), and that diversity weakens society through “degeneracy.” Throughout Superior, Saini deftly disproves all of these arguments using examples from the scientific consensus.
As Saini writes, “we are social beings, not just biological ones,” and people from different ethnic groups can be more similar genetically to each other than to others from the same group. Genes have next to nothing to do with what we think of as race or intelligence. This has been the scientific consensus for decades. “When considered from the perspective of the deep past,” Saini writes, “race, nationality, and ethnicity are not what we imagine them to be… ephemeral, real only to the extent that we made them feel real by living in the cultures we do, with the politics we have.”
All in all, I felt that Superior was an important read for this topic, as it explains the background of racial supremacy and resentment that forms much of the core of the fascist imperative.
Journalist Robert Evans, known for his disturbing and prophetic 2019 podcast It Could Happen Here, has spent a lot of time delving deeply into the backgrounds of far-right agents from their roots to what they’re up to today. In his free audiobook, The War on Everyone, Evans provides a quick but informative overview of the history and danger of fascist and white supremacists elements in US society. He tracks the development of right-wing extremism through the “Christian Identity” movement and a few key figures who brought it to its current, all too mainstream form.
Citing longer works on the subject, including some I discuss here, Evans does a good job at compiling and condensing these disparate accounts into a connected and disturbing picture of the current state of the “alt-right” and white nationalism in US politics currently. While the audio was a little rough, I’d recommend The War On Everyone as a great and accessible starting point for learning more about the goals, ideology, and horrifying methods of such groups, from The Order to the Proud Boys.
In Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America, Norwegian journalist Vegas Tenold embeds himself with some of the most infamous white nationalists and far-right agitators in the United States right around the fall of 2016 and throughout the horrifying year 2017. This was probably the first work I read on the topic, and it was definitely a harrowing place to start. Tenold takes on the quintessential “gonzo” journalist tactic of going right to the sources, befriending, for instance, the well known young fascist activist Matthew Heimbach, founder of the Traditionalist Workers Party. It’s Heimbach who calls Tenold on December 5th, 2016 to gloat about Trump’s electoral win with the mocking phrase “everything you love will burn.”
I felt that Tenold’s work chronicling Heimbach’s beliefs and goals to appeal broadly to disaffected white people was particularly informative in its horrifying specifics, and while Heimbach himself might be a fairly uninspiring figurehead, his tactics are common. Finding links and cooperation between disparate groups uniting behind Trump’s banner, from the KKK to Neo-Nazis like the Hammerskin Nation, Tenold illustrates how wide the problem is.
These extremists may, of course, dislike Trump personally, finding him to be too compromised by the “Jewish Question,” but they are all too happy to jump onto his bandwagon to spread their messages of hatred.
I felt that, of all the works that I have read for this entry, journalist Talia Lavin’s Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy lays out the connections most clearly and disturbingly. Lavin’s engaging voice brings these cruel ideologies into focus, guiding us through their convoluted and vile theories. With her background as the daughter of holocaust survivors, Lavin illustrates the terrible consequences of assuming the whacky, hideous politics of white nationalists can be ignored or tolerated as merely a bunch of awful losers (though they are).
I would definitely recommend it as a resource for those who remain skeptical about the extent of the threat and how deep the evil goes, and how our society has, so far, done little to combat it. Not as dry or technical as some of the more academic works I read, not as sensationalistic as some of the more popular, Lavin’s impeccable reporting cuts to the source of the horrors, and calls to task those who deny the fascist resurgence throughout the world. She lies bare the deep anti-Semitic coding that underlies so much of the far-right, using the Jewish population as the reason for what they see is wrong with contemporary society, from “race-mixing” to economic inequality.
While she occasionally may be a little repetitive through the chapters, I appreciated this as just making sure that the reader is kept centered through this complex thicket of odd terminology, euphemisms, and bizarre connections that are often cloaked in ironic internet culture, all but inscrutable to outsiders. Culture Warlords is a wonderful guide, in particular chapter seven, in which Lavin details figures she calls the “launderers” such as Tucker Carlson and Andy Ngo, those on the margins of the white-nationalist and fascist movements who cloak their rhetoric in reasonable-sounding language.
In the end, Lavin concludes with a detailed and heartening description of antifascism and how we as a community can band together to resist this racist, authoritarian surge. It is, I feel, essential reading after the horrifying showing last week, a coup against the will of the increasingly diverse American people that can be linked directly back to Charlottesville and its cries of “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.”
All in all, I think a major takeaway from the arguments made by these authors is that it is important to remember that fascism is not completely synonymous with Nazism as it was in early twentieth-century Germany or even Italian Fascism. Fascism shifts and evolves to fit the different historical and geographical situations, but the authoritarian, harmful core remains. This was evident at last week’s uprising.
While Trump himself may be an opportunistic narcissist with no real political beliefs aside from self-aggrandizement, those that rally to his cause fits all the definitions of fascism. At the same time, literal Neo-Nazis and other fringe elements insinuate themselves into the crowds, attempting to “red pill” them on the “Jewish Question” and “White Genocide.”
The threat will remain under the milquetoast conservative Biden. Once Trump is no longer a political fixture, these elements will find another figurehead and one who is perhaps more competent. It is for this reason that the next texts I discuss are so important. Antifascist resistance against this growing movement will be essential to keep this country from drifting further away from open democracy into further bloodshed and civil strife.
The only ethical action in my mind is to oppose fascism in all of its forms, and in my next entry, I will discuss a few works that detail the history and tactics of effective resistance.
This entry’s thematic musical companion is “Bad Country,” by Still Corners, from their 2016 album Dead Blue.