The Brooklyn Rail

During the Trump era, when troops of neo-Nazis, white nationalists, Proud Boys, MAGA hats, militiamen, and Men’s Rights Activists descended on my city, there was little debate about what to call them: “fascist” seemed simple enough, even if one did not always know what ideology, exactly, moved which knife- or stick-wielding creep. On the internet, and in the pages of the left press, however, questions arose. Was Trumpism really fascism, many asked, or merely some other bad thing—a “neo-patrimonial Bonapartism,” perhaps, as sociologist and historian of fascism Dylan Riley argued in the pages of the New Left Review? Naming Trump fascist, some worried, was dangerous hyperbole, overstating the threat he represented and obscuring the continuities between his administration and Barack Obama’s when it came to what mattered. In terms of body count, Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were far worse than anything Trump did, killing hundreds of thousands, so why “fascism”? Despite Trump’s executive orders, Obama’s administration detained and deported far more migrants than Trump’s.

At the same time, the fascists were there in their combat kilts, with their Punisher skull balaclavas and body armor, fascists without fascism, but fascists nonetheless. Perhaps, like the comparatively small movements of the far left, they posed no real threat to the liberal democratic order, which would keep grinding through the bodies of the US and world proletariat just fine on its own. Who needs fascism when you’ve got democracy this good?

This was not merely a semantic debate, but a strategic one. Naïve antifascism might sanctify the violence of US liberal democracy, a liberal democracy with its origins in the genocide of millions of Indigenous Americans and the enslavement of millions of Africans, and whose grip on the post-1945 global order has led to the deaths of millions in Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Many of the best histories of fascism followed Geoff Eley, who saw interwar fascism in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe as a kind of revolutionary counter-revolution with anticommunism at its center. This fascism, wrote Eley, “prospered under conditions of general political crisis, in societies that were already dynamically capitalist (or at least, that had a dynamic capitalist sector) but where the state was incapable of organizing for the maintenance of social cohesion” because “the left had achieved significant inroads into the administration of state power and into the limitation of private capitalist prerogative.” The origins of fascism, in this view, are to be found in the world revolution of 1917–23, when communists in Germany and Northern Italy were fighting proto-fascist freikorps and squadristi as early as 1919. The massacres of revolutionaries in Berlin in January 1919 and in Munich in April 1919 were founding acts for the Nazis and formed the model for Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch and Mussolini’s March on Rome—freikorps and squadristi became Brownshirts and Blackshirts. Wherever the revolution broke through, there fascism formed, a kind of immune response by capitalism, availing itself of exceptional powers. But if this is what fascism is—response to revolutionary threat—it’s hard to see how the term could apply to the so-called fascists we see today, where there has been no threat, revolutionary or otherwise, to the rule of capital. Perhaps a different term is necessary?

In his 2023 book, Late Fascism, developed from a series of essays written since 2016, Alberto Toscano attempts to come up with a revised concept of fascism broad enough to encompass what we see on the far-right today, while taking in stride the key differences between the interwar period and our own. Toscano offers an intervention into the so-called “fascism debate” which avoids lazy analogy but also demonstrates why well-meaning lectures from high-minded historians about the dangers of comparison are unlikely to “put the fascism debate to rest,” as metahistorian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins intends in Did It Happen Here? (2024), his Norton Anthology of fascism debaters. Such a question, which presumes that it can be answered true or false, is not the right one, Toscano tells us, as fascism is a process rather than a result—a continuum rather than a simple fork in the path. Toscano’s title is a reference to Ernst Mandel’s Der Spätkapitalismus [Late Capitalism] (1972), which sought to chart the heading of postindustrial capitalism. After fifty intervening years of economic stagnation and deindustrialization, “To the extent that we can speak of fascism today,” Toscano writes, “it is a fascism largely emptied … of mass movement and utopia.” Although this late fascism “is not reacting to the imminent threat of revolutionary politics,” it nevertheless “retains the racial fantasy of collective rebirth,” or “palingenesis.” Intriguingly, Toscano’s late fascism resembles most closely an early fascism in the settlements and plantations of the Americas and Africa, which directly inspired European, interwar fascists. (The Nuremberg Laws were modeled on Jim Crow; the methods of the Nazis derived in part from genocidal German colonization in southwest Africa, where death camps killed tens of thousands of Herero and Nama people.) To see this other fascism, however, one must engage what Cedric Robinson calls the “Black radical tradition” and its concomitant “Black construction of fascism,” from which standpoint interwar fascism in Europe looks very different. Toscano quotes from Langston Hughes, who told the 1937 antifascist International Writers’ Conference: “In America, Negroes do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.” As Toscano continues:

Long before Nazi violence came to be conceived as beyond comparison, Black radical thinkers sought to expand the historical and political imagination of an antifascist left by detailing how what could be perceived from a European or white vantage point as a radically new form of ideology and violence was in effect continuous with the history of (settler-) colonial dispossession and racial slavery.

From this vantage, the origins of fascism lie in the post-Reconstruction South, in the genocidal settlement of Texas and California, and later settler colonies in Africa and elsewhere, by European powers, especially the British. At present, the best exemplar of this “Black construction” of fascism is the prolific historian Gerald Horne, whose recent book The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of American Fascism (2022), treats the Republic of Texas as a proto-fascist state which was the basis for the Confederacy, Jim Crow, and later imperial adventures in Africa. It was here, Horne argues, “that the seeds were planted and watered for the twenty first^t century flowering of US fascism.” In other words, the future of fascism in the US lies less in Nazi Germany than it does in the Jim Crow South and the exterminationist West which come together in Texas now as they did then.

As described in Late Fascism, in the 1960s and ’70s radicals within and around the Black Panther Party used the term fascism without reservation to describe the United States, and particularly its repressive apparatus, which employed exceptional measures to destroy the Panthers and other New Left groups, killing and imprisoning their members. Organizing with the Panthers from prison, George Jackson describes the technologies of the prison-industrial complex as “manifestations of fascism” invisible to those who think liberal democracy and fascism incompatible. This “disguised and efficient” fascism operated at the margins, on the border, behind prison walls, and within those zones marked for police terror. For George Jackson’s correspondent Angela Davis, this was a “preventative” fascism, a qualification she borrowed from her mentor Herbert Marcuse. Like other Frankfurt School thinkers, including Theodor Adorno, Marcuse saw the postwar liberal democratic order as a sublation rather than negation of interwar fascism, such that fascism remained latent within it. In 1976, Marcuse could write that the “last ten to twenty years” seemed to “a preventative counter-revolution,” killing the revolutionary New Left in its womb. In the United States in particular, Marcuse wrote, he could detect an “incipient” fascism, though one no longer requiring dictatorial means: “American fascism will probably be the first which comes to power by democratic means and with democratic support.” The insight of the Black construction of fascism is that it already was the first.

The danger of such a framework, however, is that it might reduce nearly every capitalist society to a fascism in some state of development. If the cops are fascism then almost every society is fascist. As Toscano notes and others have pointed out, this “Black construction of fascism” derives in part from the definition of fascism used by the Communist Party USA in its Third Period era, aggregating Hitler’s fascism and Roosevelt’s “social fascism” under a single framework. In the 1980s and ’90s antiracist organizers confronting neo fascist groups found such theory particularly problematic, because it was unable to distinguish between state and extra-state groups, and discounted the degree to which neo fascism was often antistatist in orientation, sometimes even imitating other aspects of the left, as with the “third-positionist” or “red-brown” groups that emerged during this time. If the state simply was fascism, then that left unexplained the antistatist orientation of these new groups. As a result, many antifascists found it important to develop a “three-way fight” perspective, as articulated by the online publication Three Way Fight, which distinguished between the authoritarian-state and extra-state fascism in order to better understand and fight both. Toscano’s formulation avoids these problems by treating fascism as an emergent, differential phenomenon, out of sync with historical time and organized spatially. Fascism is not a light switch you can turn on or off, not a predicate an entity either has or doesn’t have, but rather a possibility latent within capitalism.

This is in part because fascism isn’t just a form of social and political organization but an idea about the future—hence you can have fascists without fascism just as you can have communists without communism. This is important because, as Toscano shows, fascism is not total submission to power—total repression, as is sometimes thought—but motivated by offering particular practices of freedom and transgression. If we see fascism simply as repression, Toscano argues, we fail to see how it appeals to women, for example, to whom it offers something more than a role as mother or wife. Fascism can be edgy, subversive, punk, freaky. With late fascism, however, as Toscano points out, these fantasies typically have their locus in the 1950s rather than the preindustrial past, and involve some idea of the good liberal state, the minimal state, before its corruption by the Civil Rights Act or Roe v. Wade, by worldwide decolonization, feminism, and queer and trans liberation. By extension, in the United States, the fascist imaginary involves the recovery of destiny, of greatness, of American leadership in the world and the benefits derived therefrom, of the postwar boom fed by imperial superprofits. This explains, I think, why its fantasies of mythic violence tend toward the defensive (or preventative) rather than the counter-revolutionary or reactive—drawing upon an old patriotic imaginary dating back to the American Revolution and referenced in the names of prominent contemporary right-wing militias: Oath Keepers, Three Percenters. These groups are quite different than the terrorist militias of the 1990s, as they are much more likely to see themselves as auxiliaries of the state, but in a way that positions them against another part of the state deemed corrupt. In the minds of its participants, the January 6 takeover of the US Capitol was neither coup nor insurrection but a defense of a democratic process that had been corrupted by malevolent actors. The reasons for this are rather obvious, and only hinted at it in Toscano’s book: in the US, fascism does not need to remake the state at the constitutional level, unlike in Germany and Italy, whose half-fledged Republics were not functional. Who needs a new state, when the balance of powers in the US has been a more-than-adequate vehicle for a legalized settler-and-planter fascism?

It can be hard, admittedly, to distinguish the preventative from the counter-revolutionary. Even during the interwar period, the counter-revolutionary and the preventative become blurred, as in the case of 1920s and ’30s Portugal. If we are to follow the indications in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935), then the fascism of Jim Crow must be understood as a reaction to radical Reconstruction and the Civil War, which Du Bois described as a “general strike” of the enslaved. For Gerald Horne, the creation of Texas was precisely such a counter-revolution, as much reactive as preventative. The same could be said of the plantation system itself, which became increasingly brutal and repressive in response to slave uprisings and the future threat they promised; the Haitian Revolution and Nat Turner’s Rebellion providing something to react to as well as something to prevent. As for the US West, settlers there typically provoked indigenous resistance by encroaching upon territory and committing atrocities until indigenous self-defense could be used as pretext for genocide, a process both preventative and reactive. Nor is it clear how to describe the neo fascism of the postwar era; while the New Left nowhere raised a truly revolutionary challenge, it nonetheless merited counter-insurgency and state repression. In Chile, Pinochet’s anticommunist coup of 1973 seems rather well-described as a counter-revolutionary fascism.

One implication of these two streams of analysis, originating in two different chapters of the book, is that taking seriously the phenomenology of the fascist myth would mean qualifying the extent to which fascism requires revolutionary threat as its precondition. Inasmuch as fascism is an idea about the future based on myth about the past, it can be difficult to distinguish prevention from reaction. Where no threat exists, fascists can easily conjure one, as they did in the world-historical year 2020, treating the anti-police George Floyd Uprising (and the COVID-19 pandemic) as evidence of a vast Democrat-led revolution. Today, preventative fascism positions itself as response to a looming threat that is always as much racial or civilizational as it is political and to which it gives the oxymoronic name “white genocide.” Among the most important contributions of Toscano’s book is its identification of late fascism with Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918). Drawing upon Furio Jesi’s antifascist reading of Spengler, Toscano shows that Spenglerian late fascism is less about the fantasy of a thousand-year Reich than it is about manning the gates of white civilization and holding back the racialized, barbarian horde for as long as possible. Its antiquity is more Greek city-state or colony than Roman Empire. Spenglerian fascism is a pessimistic “religion of death” whose participants follow a sacrificial logic of “winning by dying” where the point is the cultivation of pseudo-authentic values. This explains very well the structure of fascist formations like the now-decimated Proud Boys, which are “pro-Western civilization” and oriented toward the reclamation of vague civilizational values which Jesi describes as “ideas without words,” a fascist structure of resentment that mediates its own internal contradictions remaining ineffable. Think, here, of Trump’s strange facial contortions or Hitler’s spasmodic ejaculations.

As Toscano argues, this late, Spenglerian fascism cannot be understood without taking in stride the “Black construction” of fascism. At the heart of Spengler’s Decline of the West, one can find an inverted form of Du Bois’s assertion that “the problem of the twentieth-century is the problem of the color line.” In Spengler, this rising color line becomes a Great Wall manned by proud, death-bound warrior-citizens. Toscano quotes from a 1933 review of Spengler’s work, written by Benito Mussolini, who read Spengler as saying that “the world is threatened by two revolutions: one white and one colored.” Unlike the democratic “social” revolution which introduces a crisis of values, the “other revolution is that of the peoples of color, who, being more prolific than the peoples of the white race, will eventually overwhelm it.” This latter revolution is driven by demographic forces that can be no more resisted than one can resist the evolution of the species. Western civilization is less a beautiful machine which can be repaired and improved than it is a glorious animal which must die, sooner or later. Late fascists fight to make this death as late as possible. The point is to live long and die honorably.

The implications of this point for antifascist strategy and tactics are profound and not really drawn out by Toscano, who makes few specific references to contemporary events or contemporary manifestations of fascism. Those who are oriented toward “winning by dying,” winning while losing, cannot be beat outright, through direct confrontation, as they are regenerated—sustained by violent defeat so long as it is noble. In early 2017, in the weeks following Trump’s inauguration, when many panicked that Trump might introduce an antidemocratic “state of emergency,” the now-forgotten alt-right celebrity Milo Yiannopoulos visited UC Berkeley to peddle his particular brand of anti-trans rodomontade. Once he and his hundreds of attendees were inside the student union, a massive antifascist march descended on the campus, using fireworks, rocks, and other projectiles to drive the campus police protecting Yiannopoulos back inside the building. After twenty minutes of shooting tear gas and rubber bullets from the balconies and the roof, they declared the talk canceled, a small victory. As attendees spilled out into the streets, antifascists pummeled the outnumbered Proud Boys who had driven into town. As a result, the Proud Boys developed a fixation with Berkeley, to which they returned several times over the next year, now seen as ground zero for Soros-funded, Democrat-led antifascists. They came back bigger and stronger, fighting antifascists to a violent stalemate that left the fascists invigorated and many antifascists injured and traumatized. What stopped them, eventually, was numbers. When they confronted a crowd of thousands, too many to fight, they never returned. Proud Boys take pride in violence, but they hate to be humiliated. But even where one lacks a crowd of thousands, there are ways to confront fascists obliquely rather than frontally, and that don’t provide targets against which they can test themselves. It’s worth asking what would have happened if the black bloc which shut down the talk had skipped dessert—not stayed around to beat up Proud Boys—and simply melted away into the night.

It is by now a commonplace that the next Trump will be worse. Trump was a trial balloon, a pantomime of fascism, lacking the organization to follow through on his intentions. First time farce, next time tragedy. But if American fascism is democratic fascism it is also provincial and thus often antiFederal, emerging through county and state-level government—especially local policing—and through the judiciary. In the twenty-first century, it is a largely suburban, exurban, and rural phenomenon, emerging in the hinterland and on the borders. In hindsight it may be seen to have done as well since Trump’s presidency as it did during it. At the center of this new “border fascism,” to use the term Toscano borrows from Brendan O’Connor, one finds law enforcement and its representatives, who have empowered themselves immensely under Biden by reference to a crime wave they helped generate through tactical non-enforcement and manipulation of statistics. The best example of this unleashed policing can be found in the response to the Stop Cop City/Defend the Atlanta Forest movement in Georgia, where police have murdered an activist and where prosecutors have charged dozens with new state-level domestic terrorism charges, as well as unprecedented RICO charges. As a reading of the bloviating indictment shows, there is a direct line leading to these prosecutions from the fascist myths and wordless ideas of 2020, myths in which antifa and BLM were the visible face of a highly-organized and deeply-funded conspiracy, sometimes connected to the pandemic shutdowns and vaccinations. In the Stop Cop City movement, prosecutors allege to have found evidence of such an organization, dating back to the George Floyd Uprising. This is a fascism that crosses political affiliations, however, as Atlanta Democrats work with Georgia Republicans to push the police training facility forward and crush all resistance to it. Fascist myths are now general. During the George Floyd Uprising, MAGA paranoia found its left-wing other in rumors that rioters were police provocateurs or white nationalist infiltrators, and that the nightly fireworks displays which took overs cities that pandemic summer were not the work of bored kids on lockdown but orchestrated by the FBI to terrorize city dwellers. Today, Democrats and Republicans join hands in perpetuating McCarthyist myth in order to repress pro-Palestine activists, whitewash Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and link the US left to a vague global “terror.”

One key extrapolation from Toscano’s book, then, is that the opposition of dictatorial fascism to democratic antifascism no longer makes much sense, if it ever did. This is because the “border fascism” which he describes, with its roots in the settlement of the Americas, tends to transform the temporal logic of the fascist exception into a spatial one. Border fascism transforms the “state of emergency” from a period of dictatorial rule into an emergency territory, a zone of exception in which extraordinary violence can be used and democratic norms suspended. Border fascism often takes the form of apartheid—territorializing the fascist exception. The best current example of such a state of affairs is Israel, or if we take a wider view of the contemporary, the late settler-colonies in South Africa. This is a fascism particularly suited to responding to the challenges which capitalism will face in the coming century even if no revolutionary threat to it emerges and the future turns out to be as bad as it looks in the movies. “As ‘the cycles of capitalism driving mass migration and repression converge with the climate crisis’, Toscano writes, quoting from O’Connor, “and a racial-civilisational crisis is spliced with scenarios of scarcity and collapse, the extreme and authoritarian right will map its politics of time—and especially its obsession with epochal loss of privilege and purity—onto the space of territory.” Here Toscano imagines the future of fascism as a kind of eco-apartheid, an ecological Israel/Palestine, where the psychological wages of whiteness that W.E.B. Du Bois described are physicalized as ecological mitigation. We’ve all read this book, or seen the TV show.

If this is the medium-term future for fascism, Toscano’s book also allows us to speculate about the near-term. In 2020, many on the left worried about the emergence of a second US Civil War, as conflict over Trump’s election developed into outright attempts at insurrection, secession, and territorial autonomy, scenarios explored in Robert Evans’s popular podcast It Could Happen Here. This is certainly a possibility, but Toscano’s book should lead us to locate the future of US fascism as much in the Civil War as in the struggle against Reconstruction by the terrorist KKK and others. Reconstruction ended in 1876, let’s remember, as the result of an equivocal election and the resulting constitutional crisis. In exchange for the Presidency, Republicans handed the South over to the Democrats, opening the door for Jim Crow. This seems a much more likely trajectory for the development of fascism in the US than civil war—a constitutional crisis resulting in a compromise which allows for the development of twenty-first century US fascism at the edges of US liberal democracy. While civil war could still follow, the history of the United States shows the constitution to be an extraordinarily flexible document, especially when there is a pliable judiciary.

None of this obviates the need for a “three-way fight” analysis, however, especially in the long term, and it would have been nice if Toscano had engaged with this line of criticism, as he did in the longer article from which the book is drawn. While democracy may be adequate for fascism, allowing ample room for authoritarian exception, what isn’t so clear is whether capitalism will be, especially as stagnant deindustrializing economies with aging populations confront the climate crisis. In the US, red-brown, anticapitalist fascism, national bolshevism, and other formations have made little headway, given the prominence of libertarianism among the far right. But this may not always remain the case, nor should we count out the possibility of a true revolutionary challenge to capitalism emerging as the world’s poor are forced to bear the brunt of climate change. If elites find reproduction of their control over social wealth no longer possible through capitalist means, they will seek out others, and may find genocide, ethnic cleansing, segregation, forced labor, extra-state violence, and militarization—elements of a categorical definition of fascism comprising all the cases discussed here—useful means of transition to a class society no longer based on wages and profits, perhaps availing itself of new technologies of surveillance and control.

There is another sense in which a three-way fight analysis might be appropriate. Fascism tends to produce agglomerated enemies—the Nazis Judeo-Bolshevism, for example, which linked a “racial-civilizational” other to a political one. In the US, the agglomerate has always been “Black Bolshevism” or some variant thereof—while freikorps were murdering communists in Germany in 1919, elites in the US fused the worldwide “Red Scare” with a local “Black Scare,” as detailed in Charisse Burden-Stelly’s Black Scare/Red Scare (2023). Here was preventative fascism in the US, responding to a half-invented threat with violent antiblack riots and the Department of Justice’s Palmer Raids, in which as many as six thousand anarchists and communists were arrested, and five hundred foreign nationals deported. Today’s fascist agglomerates highlight the racial and civilization as well as the political, as one sees in current attempts by the far right to link Black Lives Matter to Hamas. These agglomerates are also frequently sexual and gendered—directed to a non-conforming Other who threatens the family and limits fascist freedom (to be racist, sexist, or phobic). Often, however, these are contradictory agglomerates, and though fascists have no problem with contradiction, antifascists should pay attention lest they end up wearing the contradictions of their enemies. Since October 7, we have seen antisemitic white nationalists joining hands with liberal Zionists around a common Islamophobia, while intransigently antisemitic fascists show up to pro-Palestine rallies bearing swastikas. Inasmuch as fascist ideology is dream-logic, or wordless idea, it knows no contradiction. But there is a danger that antifascists, who do value reason and transparency, might absorb such contradictions, either by denying the existence of contemporary antisemitism or, alternately, denying the Islamophobia at the heart of Zionism. Though the latter position is rarely seen in the US, it remains dominant among German antifascists who—unable to see beyond the political theology of the Holocaust—continue to associate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

This may be the best argument for adopting Toscano’s framework. What matters is not the terms we use but what those terms allow us to see. While apartheid, settler colonialism, white nationalism, and other terms may function well enough in particular contexts, using fascism for all of these manifestations allows us to see the continuity between the contemporary far right, interwar fascism, and the pre-fascism of the nineteenth century. Tomorrow’s fascism may not emerge in response to a revolutionary threat, but it will require a revolution to eradicate it once and for all. Fascism is a kind of weed which grows inexorably from the soil of capitalism. Antifascism can pull it up by the roots, perhaps, or stomp it out, but it can’t stop it from returning unless it becomes revolutionary, unless it tears up the soil of capitalism and produces a classless society in which the seeds of fascism can no longer sprout.