Against Fascism Part Three: It Continues
It’s been a couple of years since I last discussed the topic of fascism and its resurgence in the United States and worldwide, but sometimes it feels like just last week. At the same time, it feels like ages ago. Helping my partner through her pregnancy and now taking care of a one-year-old has, I think, been a welcome distraction but has made time especially weird these past two years, even after the Pandemic really messed things up. Having this little person also makes the future more real, keeping hope for a better world while watching things deteriorate in ways I’ve never seen in my country. The last two years of the Biden administration have done little to quench the flames as the Republican party continues to embrace ever more horrific, anti-democratic rhetoric regarding trans rights, particularly in Ron DeSantis’ Florida, and, overseas, Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine and Giorgia Meloni of the Brothers of Italy Party, direct descendants of the original Italian Fascists, was elected prime minister of Italy.
I crave context, searching for a better understanding of where this has come from, where it is going, but even as I feel compelled to continue reading nonfiction trying to make sense of this shift, though, it feels like one cannot keep up. In this entry, for instance, I’m looking at books published between 2017 and 2020, and it’s hard not to wonder if they are still relevant, if I’m getting anything out of them. Watching this kid grow and change so quickly underscores how futile it can feel trying to capture an accurate explanation of this volatile moment, only to be hopelessly dated before the month is out. It’s true, I think, that works of political analysis have always had a short window of relevancy before being rendered obsolete, but with my history background, these works still provide valuable context.
When I posted my reflections on books I’d been reading to make sense of it all back in 2021, for instance, in the wake of the January 6th Capitol Riots as Trump and his supporters alleged a stolen election, I was left reeling. It was a feeling not unlike I had in 2016 and 2017 after Trump’s election and, especially, after the Unite the Right Rally in August 2017, which really sparked my interest in reading various works of current events and political analysis in the first place.
The books I read reflecting on historical precedents of the political tensions simmering in the 2010s, like The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History (2010) by Jill Lepore, Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (2013) by Michael S. Kimmel, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics (2016) by John B. Judis, The Retreat of Western Liberalism (2017) by Edward Luce, and Making Sense of the Alt-Right (2017) by George Hawley during that fraught year felt to me at the time insufficient, as a whole unsatisfying. Looking back, though, these works, as they struggled to explain their moment, illustrate the uncertainty of this turning point in US politics. Couching their critiques of populism in the wake of the Great Recession, the failures of the grassroots Occupy Wallstreet movement and the Sanders campaign along with the success of the astroturfed Tea Party and its white racial resentment of the Obama administration, these works provide an interesting snapshot of the time. What these were missing, I think, is a more in-depth interrogation of the F-word, the ideology that I think most commentators at the time were unwilling to engage with or even conceive of, and I can’t really blame them. I think a lot of people were taken off guard by this sudden turn of events, even if in hindsight, all of these elements leading to the fascist resurgence were there, buzzing faintly, in the background.
Due to some of my weird niche interests by the early 2010s I found myself encountering some strange and disturbing words online, including “race realism” and “human biodiversity,” “dark enlightenment,” and “neoreaction,” but I never would have guessed that they were just the canaries in the coal mines of contemporary politics, the first stirrings of what would later be dubbed the “alt-right.” With the explosion of Gamergate and the horrors of the primaries and the election of 2016, it was shocking that a few nobodies on the internet appeared to have birthed much of the background radiation of the Trump Administration. I don’t blame the Trump election on this “meme magic,” this online “red-pilled” rhetoric directly, but they are both concurrent effects of the same societal trends building off each other.
This is why I was so intrigued to read critical analyst Elizabeth Sandifer’s 2017 collection of essays Neoreaction A Basilisk: Essays On and Around the Alt Right and former Blondie drummer and current occult aficionado Gary Lachman‘s 2018 Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump, with each delve into these arcane and hideous online underworlds, and the connections they contain that link them to the mainstream.
“But ultimately the question is fairly easy to answer: far-right movements arise when the established order starts to crack … This does not mean, as far too many commentators have suggested, that the people at Trump rallies making Hitler salutes are motivated by “economic anxiety.” They’re motivated by racism. Duh. But their racism is emboldened by a political order that visibly has no answers, is running just to keep still, and not even managing that. The path to the mainstream that this particular batch of racists took is worth documenting as a matter of historical record, but the question invites missing the forest for the trees.”- Elizabeth Sandifer, Neoreaction a Basilisk, 2017
Elizabeth Sandifer’s Neoreaction A Basilisk is a weird little tome, a collection of separate philosophical essays, but one that is really insightful of all the bizarre, profoundly stupid threads that continue to animate much of the far-right. It would be fascinating if it wasn’t so awful, and Sandifer analyzes it all in all of its awful, eerie weirdness, a weirdness that makes it difficult to turn away. All in all, this is some bleak, bleak stuff that Sandifer doesn’t sugar coat. She begins the first essay in her collection, for instance, with the statement “Let us assume we are fucked.” We hadn’t even seen 2020 yet!
Linking the ideas of such strange, niche characters as fascist English philosopher Nick Land, pseudonymous reactionary Silicon Valley blogger Mencius Moldbug (aka Curtis Yavin), and Eliezer Yudkowski, a non-reactionary rationalist philosopher whose ideas nonetheless provided intellectual fuel for the fire, there is a horrific, apocalyptic feeling throughout, both in subject matter and in the way Sandifer frames these topics. From the bizarre quasi-religious Roko’s Basilisk hinted at in the title to the seething cosmic horror that was/is Gamergate to the perfidious nature of the Austrian School, Neoreaction a Basilisk delves into some obscure and confusing territory, and I often found myself just barely able to comprehend it all. In spite of all of these interesting, deep literary rabbit holes we go in, it all might be a bit difficult to follow at times. This is an almost self-consciously obscure work, diving deep into disturbing topics filled with strange correlations and connections. Sandifer’s insights on the nexus where popular culture meets the dark urges of fascist ideology have made me see these tendrils all over the news cycle.
Gary Lachman‘s Dark Star Rising, in comparison, is a rather facile take on much of the same elements discussed by Sandifer. Like most works I’ve read on conspiratorial or paranormal topics, Lachman relies mostly on vague conscience and linking similar ideas to reach most of his conclusions. While there was some interesting discussion of beliefs about using the mind to affect reality, from New Thought, the brand of positive thinking and “prosperity gospel” that Trump has adhered to, to the idea that “meme magic” could have had an effect on the 2020 election. Lachman quotes Richard Spencer announcing “we willed Donald Trump into office, we made this dream our reality,” to drive this point home. As Lachman describes it, the “chaos magicians” of the alt-right harnessed postmodernist “relativism” to create their own reality, which seems, as a whole, unconvincing. Using the frame of “magic” (or should I say “magick?”) trappings to describe phenomena from irony (when does a joke become real?) to the nature of reality detracts from discussing the very real ideas that have come to dominate our contemporary society. For me, it’s all too convenient to blame inchoate dark forces on the rise of authoritarian regimes.
One of the threads running through Dark Star Rising, for instance, was the role that the internet and the weird, absurd way it kind of exploded into the “mainstream” mundane world in the 2010s as though a portal to some other world of chaos magic had been opened. But, I feel that it is much more concrete than that. As much as people say that the internet is virtual, it is a vital part of the everyday world and, as a major facet of today’s information media, is bound to have an effect on how people see reality. As has been seen, some aspects of internet culture lend themselves to exacerbating this drift into misinformation and feelings that the world is wrong.
“History can familiarize, and it can warn. In the late nineteenth century, just as the late twentieth century, the expansion of global trade generated expectations of progress. In the early twentieth century, as in the early twenty-first, these hopes were challenged by new visions of mass politics.”- Timothy Synder, On Tyranny, 2017
“Our nation’s egalitarian, democratic aspirations have always competed for supremacy with a darker, pathological tradition rooted in authority, obedience, and the hegemonic enforcement of majoritarian interests and norms.”- Matthew C. MacWilliams, On Fascism, 2020
Other authors attempt to analyze current political trends by looking to historical precedent, using dark times in the past as a way to examine parallels that could be used to shift our course. Timothy Synder’s and Matthew C. MacWilliams’s short works On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) and On Fascism: 12 Lessons from American History (2020) each focus on concise, readable summaries of authoritarian and anti-democratic thought through the lens of the past in order to provide a comparison with our contemporary world.
The US historian Timothy Synder’s work On Tyranny is a compelling and persuasive rumination on how we can use the past to build context of where we are now, and why modern countries remain vulnerable to fascist rhetoric. The 2021 Graphic Edition illustrated by German-American cartoonist Nora Krug is particularly absorbing as her striking artwork serves as a vivid backdrop to Synder’s thought-provoking analysis. While avoiding conflating historical events directly with contemporary ones, Snyder draws useful, if frightening, parallels from the tragedies of the past century, including Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, to give the reader concrete actions that can be done on a societal and individual level to resist the creeping growth of authoritarianism.
Snyder’s longer work, Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018) expands on his thesis and goes into much more detail, making it a dense but informative record of the historical trends that led us to our current political situation in the US, Europe, and Russia. In an intriguing theory, he discusses two competing but toxic political tendencies that have developed across the world, mirroring similar divisions in the last century, the “politics of inevitability” and the “politics of eternity.”
The politics of inevitability reflect the global neoliberal consensus at the “end of history” that all problems have been solved and that the “future is just more of the present,” which as inequality grows and wealth accumulates at the top, leads to a strengthening of the politics of eternity, the core of fascist thought. This is reflected by Russia, where the group is perfect and problems only come from outside, but Synder builds a sad indictment of both of our countries. All in all, Synder paints a vivid and disturbing picture of the last decade, focusing on Russia, with its invasion of Ukraine in 2014 as the turning point of this new rise of fascism, of implausible deniability, and Illustrates how important history is to understand our current world, from the Medieval Rus to the American Revolution.
US scholar Matthew C. MacWilliams’ On Fascism, another condensed and readable study of this topic sketches out the authoritarian legacy of US society through the lens of twelve lessons from US history, twelve times various darker impulses have overtaken whatever the nation’s more egalitarian promises are. A fast and informative read, MacWilliams demonstrates that anti-democratic thought, against the “promise of America,” is certainly not alien to the US, using examples from the 18th to the 21st centuries, but is not a very deep account. While it could serve as an easy introduction to the more insidious aspects of the American experience, there is little discussion of what fascism itself is, aside from authoritarianism in general, which I feel is not quite the same thing. MacWilliams, for instance, missed the opportunity in his analysis to discuss how the historic policies of the US regarding race over the centuries served as inspiration for fascist regimes in Europe, particularly Hitler’s Germany. In addition, much of MacWilliams’ data he uses to analyze the current anti-democratic mood of many US citizens is drawn from a few surveys and questionnaires, which seem a rather simplistic measure of political belief. On Fascism does provide some food for thought on the long history of unjust policies and beliefs in US history, but it only really scratches the surface, I feel.
A much deeper but still accessible source for much of what MacWilliams discusses is historian Erika Lee’s excellent America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (2019), which explores how nativism, a distrust and fear of immigration, is an ongoing element of US culture, coexisting with the idealistic perception of the US as a “nation of immigrants.” In particular for those of us with our own family immigrant backgrounds, with great or great great grandparents arriving in the country around the turn of the 20th century, like myself, how our ancestors fit in this ongoing history is eye-opening.
Lee arranges her account in a basically chronological manner, beginning with suspicions of the effects of an influx of German immigration in the 18th century and continuing to the “build the wall,” “shithole countries” narratives of today, with many disturbing and horrific stops along the way, from the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act to the eugenics based Immigration Act of 1924 to California’s 1994 Proposition 187. While mentioning the genocide and displacement of indigenous people, she mainly discusses treatment towards settlers from Europe, Asia, and the rest of the Americas, each group illustrating shifting ideas towards race, nationality, and borders.
Lee illustrates how attitudes towards immigrants change (and remain the same) through time, discussing much that I had not been aware of even with my history background. It is striking to see the parallels that exist between these past outpourings of xenophobia and its current forms, and setting citizens’ worries about change onto newcomers has always proven to be an effective political strategy, far easier than doing anything to address the shared concerns, economic or social, that affects everyone. It’s pretty shocking, for instance, to realize that the same Supreme Court that repudiated its 1944 decision endorsing the detention of Japanese-Americans cited “national security” as a reason for its 2018 decision upholding the unconstitutional Muslim Travel Ban.
“But first and foremost, combating hate requires understanding it- not what it seems to be or what we hope it amounts to, but what it actually is. That includes who supports it, why they do and how their experience reflects a reality we all share.”- Seyward Darby, Sisters in Hate, 2020
So far, I’ve discussed the books I read approaching the subject of fascism from a more historical, societal lens, arguing among themselves if it is accurate to say that fascism of one form or another has come to the mainstream in the US or other countries, and how this could have happened. Journalist Seyward Darby’s frightening Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism (2020) provides a deep dive into the fringe ideologies that began to worm their way into mainstream political thought. As described in Neoreaction in Basilisk, these toxic views celebrating inequality and oppression festered online until they latched onto the grievance politics of the Trump campaign to serve their agendas, but Darby’s focus on three specific white women who served as figureheads in the movement really makes it feel real, out of the dim cover of the internet.
The three women profiled in Sisters in Hate were each awful in their own way, from the old-school Neo-Nazi (since having denounced her former beliefs), to the tradwife New Agey Christian mom blogger, to the hardline radical-right propagandist, and Darby does not censor their noxious rhetoric, making for some difficult reading. Her research into these women of the alt-right, delving deeply into their hidden “safe-spaces” online, interviewing each to frame their odious beliefs in their own words illustrates, I feel, the different ways people can be radicalized, even to an ideology deeply hostile to their own political freedoms. Each working in her own way to move white nationalism deeper into the public consciousness, Sisters in Hate serves as a detailed example of how these extremist elements interact with and infiltrate more mainstream right wing spaces. As a whole, I think Darby provides a bracing but informative account of the anxieties that drive people, especially those seeking some sort of meaning in a confusing world, to embrace these darkest of impulses, impulses that inevitably lead to violence and death, which I will discuss in my next entry on the topic.
Whether these historians, journalists, and political scientists prove to be totally off base or full of insight into their topics, the perceptions they provide are valuable in parsing both what we know and what we don’t. From the weirder, more esoteric currents circulating deeply but insidiously under the mainstream to the oppressive elements of US society that have been with us for centuries, our racism, misogyny, and genocide, learning more about the origins and growth of these right-wing tendencies can help us identify them, and perhaps we might have a better position to oppose and reverse them. In the next essay, I will look at the results of fascist rhetoric in practice, the growth of violence and what has come to be called “stochastic terrorism.”