The Brooklyn Rail

Politics

What a puzzling picture the new fascism presents, a fascism of lawyers rather than paramilitaries. The lawyers’ specialty: finding loopholes and contradictions within the tens of thousands of administrative regulations that emanate from government agencies. Added to the mix are the varied interpretations given to the US Constitution and the confusing array of outcomes reached through legislation and court rulings. A field day for critics of democratic bureaucracy!

Some initiatives are extraordinarily strategic—like the master plan Project 2025 to systematically dismantle the government’s bureaucracy. Others are pure opportunism—witness the income-enhancing decisions undertaken by compatriots in the Department of Health and Human Services (led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.). Planned or opportunistic, the greater aim is to disrupt the preexisting synthesis of laws, rules, and procedures that define the status quo.

That the “status quo” already provided ample occasions for disruption adds to the chaos that engulfs national and international governing norms. While the lawyerly intent is to make more chaotic what is already chaotic, the disorder and confusion have clear outcomes in view, no matter how scattershot, nonsensical, or arbitrary. The goal is to remold contemporary institutions into such a format that they can never be reformatted again. For the new fascists, a brief window of opportunity offers them the chance of a lifetime. Only two years separate their inauguration from the next round of national elections. Whatever is to be accomplished must occur at a quick, hothouse tempo.

One caveat, though: everything must be undertaken while enhancing the profit-making opportunities of the participants. If a type of nihilism drives today’s politics, it is nonetheless a nihilism infused with a capitalist ethos—the social good and the good for individuals so intertwined as to be inseparable. Governance and greed are together elevated into a singular set of practices. At root is the desire for a market system un-impinged on by outside factors, especially government agents and governmental actions. Crypto investments and consulting fees are parts of the equation.

Despite commonplace contrasts between the rule of law and the rule of authoritarians who disregard the law, the lawyers have done what the best law schools taught them: to zealously advocate for their clients, whose interests are identical to their own. Rather than a zealous defense, the new legal standard is a zealous offense. The law becomes a tool to be used by authoritarians, not a protection against them.

This twist on a hallowed legal principle is one reason why the new fascists are embraced by traditional conservatives for their daring, creative, outside-the-box thinking. Legal behavior has been reshaped to replace the logjams that had come to typify the various governing processes.

Because legislators are also drawn from the ranks of lawyers (some one-third of Congress members), we are witnessing the substitution of elected lawyers by appointed ones. The old democracy or the new fascism—flipsides that favor related sets of individuals, a palace coup facilitated by means of elections and universal suffrage.

The Alt-Right

The racial ideologies that were important to the fascisms of old and central to the mass mobilizations of fascism’s classical era during the 1920s and 1930s are of little interest to the lawyers. This in itself puts the lawyers at odds with the less successful part of today’s fascism: the alt-right paramilitaries. The paramilitaries never found their footing, unable to agree among themselves ideologically about who to hate the most: mixed race couples, Central American immigrants, women who love men or sometimes women who love other women, Jews who oppose genocide, advocates of diversity initiatives, the “elite” (other than the lawyers and businessmen with whom they are aligned).

The lawyers left it to the legislators to fine-tune this aspect of right-wing ideology and transform it into something more universal: a general xenophobia (rather than a racism) aimed at the undocumented. The legislators also transformed another part of right-wing ideology into something quite specific: moral outrage at trans women who play sports, an outrage that taps into the population’s general unease with sexuality in a world that makes pornography, and child pornography in particular, abundantly available. Freedom, in the right’s way of thinking, has its limits, and trans women, adolescents in the process of transitioning, and trans men and women in the military overstep them.

The focus on scapegoats, that is, on groups too small (trans women) or too weak (the undocumented who live in poverty and exist without legal recourse), is the only part of the new fascism with broad support among its constituencies. Both groups are easy targets, given their relative degrees of isolation and dearth of resources to defend themselves. It is a focus that helps remove scrutiny—and disappointment—from other new fascist measures, such as the rising cost of living.

Promises have been made about the prosperity that lies ahead, and expectations have risen in response. The danger for the new fascists is that a politicized populace is easily disappointed. Besides, suppression of these two groups—the trans community and the undocumented—will not yield material benefits for the supporters of the new fascism. The jobs of the undocumented—as day laborers in construction, farming, the food industry, and domestic service—are generally not sought by the rest of the citizenry, and the trans community is a minority within the minority LGBTQ community.

Nor were the alt-right’s attempts to rally mass support successful. The infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, planned over a period of months, yielded many more counter-protestors, who only needed a few days to mobilize. And despite the attention given to the events of January 6, 2021, further momentum was absorbed by the presidential campaign. The alt-right has been a movement without traction.

Where the alt-right exists is on the internet, and there its influence is both malicious and pernicious. Its crowning achievements are the intense campaigns of harassment organized against specific individuals—often public officials and public health scientists. The internet alt-right thus functions as an online paramilitary, tackling indirectly what the lawyers are attempting head-on. The assortment of “lone wolves” who have been schooled politically by the online chatter are a backhanded acknowledgement of the movement’s inability to provide an institutional home for violent acts. The police, despite their own fascistic leanings, remain too powerful for direct confrontation and, in any case, generally oppose violence not perpetuated by themselves.

Neither the lawyers, nor their allied legislators, have much need for the paramilitaries. Why bother with demonstrations, hate speech, and street fighting when the electoral escalator can take you straight to the highest tiers of the legislative, judicial, and executive realms? Except for online intimidation, the paramilitaries have little to offer. This situation may change—if the radical left rekindles the energy and presence that was suppressed during the pro-Palestinian protests or if future elections go against the new fascists. But as of now, the alt-right remains isolated and largely ineffective.

Analysis

The thoroughness with which the new fascism has rattled international norms is another unanticipated outcome. That no one fully understood what was coming, despite the massive planning effort that coalesced within the right prior to the election, is not entirely surprising. The intellectual community—academic, political, and media alike—has an exceptionally poor track record regarding major transformations that beset the global order. Economists were clueless about the economic turmoil of the 1970s, the political science and military establishments had not foreseen the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the business community continued blissfully into the Great Recession of 2008 as if all was well, and today, no one seems to agree about the if, when, and how of tariffs—if they will be effective, how long it takes for the negative effects to appear, and who will gain most by them or be hit the hardest. Analysis has become a jumble of opinions in which anyone can participate.

The cynicism about truth and science embraced by the new fascists, despite their own status among the educated classes (and schooling at elite institutions) reflects the general skepticism among the population about what and who to believe.¹ Nonetheless, it is a curious situation to witness intellectuals disparaging each other for not comprehending what they themselves are unable to clarify. This situation speaks to the baffling nature of a capitalist system that is fully understood neither on a theoretical level nor in terms of current configurations and projections into the future.

The tariffs put into perspective the tenets that have guided the world ever since the partial collapse and reorganization of the world’s economy that began during the 1970s. It then appeared to the American bourgeoisie, and to the intellectual establishment in general, that the United States was on the decline economically vis-à-vis the productive capabilities that had unfolded in other parts of the world. China is the focus of late, but most every country has experienced a greatly enhanced ability to produce commodities in massive quantities. Intensified global competition seemed to imply a resetting—and partial equalization—of interstate relations. Cooperative trade agreements exemplified this developing state of affairs—a coordinated, and therefore planned, readjustment through which mutual dependence and a peaceful world order might emerge. It was even thought that free trade and democracy were corollaries of one another.

Today, though, the ability to impose tariffs unilaterally on every country the world over, and in some cases incorporate them into foreign policy negotiations, makes clear that the decades-long talk about globalization and neoliberalism masked the power dynamics behind the shifting foreign policy and trade relations. The tariffs speak to the re-assertion of the US’s world dominance. But to reassert power implies that it was there all along.

Nor is it clear that the term “tariff” is the best means to understand the current reshuffling of economic and political relations. Perhaps it would be better to think of tariffs as a form of unilateral taxation.

Economics

Tariffs transfer wealth from some businesses and countries to other businesses and countries, in this case towards the US. The tariffs are also accompanied by pledges to purchase commodities, especially gas and oil, and invest in manufacturing within the US. South Korea, for instance, has promised to make 350 billion dollars in investments and purchase 100 billion dollars of liquefied natural gas. Japan pledged 550 billion dollars for investments, the European Union another 600 billion dollars plus.²

This pattern of tariffs, investments, and purchases constitutes the largest on-the-spot redistribution of resources that the world has ever experienced. It is a transformative moment, on par with an era a century ago, when governments realized that the credit system could be expanded exponentially by government deficit spending. Economic collapses—recessions, as in 2008 or 2020, and deep depressions—destroy value as the economy recalibrates to a lower level of functioning. Today, though, it is not the disappearance of wealth that characterizes developments, but its transfer from one set of owners (businesses and countries) to another set, free of charge.

The tariffs have already inaugurated a second level of redistribution that is purely internal to the US. Because tariffs raise prices on imported goods, manufacturers and distributors who rely on imports experience increased factor costs, as do consumers who depend on imported goods (like medicines). Just as importantly, tariffs provide leverage for domestic producers to raise prices alongside the price rises that are provoked by the tariffs. Tariffs thus precipitate a generalized inflation of the economy. For some businesses, tariffs represent an additional cost, but for others, they are an opportunity to secure windfall profits.

Except in economics textbooks, inflation (higher prices) never affects everyone evenly. Some economic sectors and some segments of the population feel it more acutely than others. The overall result is a thoroughgoing redistribution of income, albeit in two independent manners. For businesses caught within the supply chain, the uncertainty of factor costs turns planning (and investment) into fraught actions that are often postponed rather than hazarding off-base actions. Inflation is part of the overall chaos that overwhelms business decisions.

For consumers—that is, for members of the working and middle classes—inflation redirects part of their incomes back to businesses. Inflation always trickles up. The greater the monopolistic power of individual firms, the greater their ability to reposition prices in their own favor. This ability to raise prices is especially great when the workforce is mostly unorganized and without representation, as it is in the US.

Foreign companies thus find themselves in an untenable position where they must either raise prices to recoup what they have lost to the US (and thereby make inflation a worldwide phenomenon) or else cut prices in order to sell additional goods outside the US. The bind in which this places them is still another part of the chaos that is spreading throughout the globe.

The further intensification of international competition rebounds as well on US firms, since the domestic market is already too small for all that they can produce.

The US Economy

Factory utilization in the US is currently pegged at the high-70 percentiles. Economists view the low to mid-80s as optimal, lest bottlenecks and other supply chain problems interfere, although during times of national emergencies such as wars, utilization rates in the low to mid-90s are not uncommon. Within this framework, it’s not new investments that are needed, but new customers. The pledges to purchase US commodities will help this situation, although the pledges have been focused on areas already functioning at high levels—the oil and gas extraction industries have not run at below 95 percent capacity for a half decade already.³

New investments require massive resources, yet they generate relatively little employment. Apple pledged 500 billion dollars for the production of computer chips, an investment projected to produce 20,000 jobs (at a cost of 25 million dollars per new employee).⁴ Extrapolating from the collective investment pledges by Apple, South Korea, Japan, and the EU (500, 350, 550, 650 billion dollars, respectively), the total yield would be some 82,000 jobs. There are, however, 12.75 million manufacturing employees in the US, and an overall workforce of over 170 million.⁵ Costly, technology-laden investments are a dead end employment-wise. If it is jobs that are desired, the focus would be on the owner-operators who run small businesses and not the major corporations that dominate the economy.⁶ Nail salons and restaurants generate jobs, not computer chip installations.

Job creation will therefore not be sufficient to create the level of demand needed to buttress the nation’s economy. Personal and household consumption in the US account for some two-thirds of the nation’s gross national product, with much of the rest devoted to the equally-sized components of new investments and government spending.⁷ The inadequacy of consumption ought to be axiomatic to economic thinking, since a nation’s output must cover both consumption and the production of sufficient profits (for economists, savings) from which investments and government spending are derived.

Investments are the key here, since they depend on profitability. Only an economy functioning at full capacity and with all savings invested—not in financial instruments and real estate but in new productive endeavors—could ever satisfy its own requirements. There is no escaping the need for external markets to compensate for the inability to create them internally.

A century ago, Rosa Luxemburg theorized aspects of this dynamic, that is, the need for foreign markets to serve as an outlet for the world’s factories. She wrote during an era similar to today, of failed free trade agreements and increasing protectionism by means of tariffs and other restrictions. And while her argumentation was sometimes contradictory, she nonetheless identified a dynamic that is of great importance whenever the capitalist system heads into a period of turmoil and imperialist aggression. The economic conundrum she addressed speaks directly to the situation in which the new fascists are enmeshed. Tariffs seemingly solve economic problems specific to the US while they simultaneously further intensify international competition.

For the great majority of the US population, consumption has stagnated for a half century already and offers no solution to the economic dilemmas the new fascists hope to solve.⁸ Even though commodities have grown cheaper due to increases in productivity, overall purchasing power has consisted of the substitution for some goods by others—phones and personal computers rather than vacations and summer camps, processed foods rather than fresh fruits and vegetables, longer working hours that require daycare facilities and after-school activities, two incomes to support a family on the level that one income was once sufficient, and so on.⁹

Matters have been especially dire at the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, but it is only the upper 20 percent of the population who have seen real improvements in their standard of living. At the very top—the billionaire level and the rungs just below—there has been an enormous growth in income and wealth, centered in stocks, bonds, and real estate. For everyone else—the 60 percent that is customarily referred to as the middle class—maintaining stasis has been the rule.¹⁰ It is this circumstance that has facilitated the rise of the new fascists. The status quo remains a situation of treading water.

It will take a ruthless regime to now impoverish a population already upset about the lack of upward mobility. The new, big-bad budget begins this process by stripping government benefits and programs away from the poorest sectors of the population. To repurpose a catchphrase once used by a radical left inspired by Luxemburg: the new fascism simply represents a harsher form of the old capitalism.

The Collegiate System

The new fascists must feel pleased with themselves, having achieved so much and so quickly vis-à-vis the university system. The latter simply crumbled, starting even before the national elections when university leaders were ridiculed for not equating criticisms of Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza with antisemitism. It has been downhill ever since.

That the university system is so thoroughly dependent on the federal and state governments for funding makes this outcome seem almost inevitable. Educational institutions have never been self-sufficient, not even the wealthy top-tier institutions that have been the focus of new fascist attention. Pieces of educational institutions have been peeled off periodically as profit-centers, but their core functions need substantial financial support—some combination of public financing and private donations with their ensuing endowments. Governmental grants and contracts sustain faculty research and provide funds to cover administrative and infrastructural costs, and grants and loan programs provide educational funding for students and their parents.

By targeting the top-tier institutions, private and public, the entire system of higher education has been placed on notice. Lawsuits and punitive actions will beleaguer any institution that does not comply with directives that issue from governmental authorities. The threats have been draconian—to heavily tax endowment funds, freeze the admission of international students, and cancel billions of dollars in already-allocated research funding.

The end results, though, have been relatively mild. At the time of writing, Harvard was negotiating a 500 million dollar fine—the heftiest of any levied so far—to resolve the lawsuits and administrative measures that the government had taken against it.¹¹ Nonetheless, 500 million dollars represents less than 1 percent of Harvard’s 53 billion dollar endowment. This amount has been deemed sufficient by the new fascist lawyers to restore much of its research funding and ease the restrictions on international students. Harvard will also need to submit admissions data for scrutiny by government officials, part of the overall new fascist campaign to eradicate initiatives that focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

As with other parts of the new fascist ideology, there is not much reality behind the attacks on DEI. It is true, as the new fascists charge, that at top-tier institutions like Harvard, white students are severely under-represented. Nationally, white students are just over half of all undergraduates, but at Harvard only one-third of the undergraduates are white. Black and Latine students who have been the focus of DEI initiatives, though, are also underrepresented. The main thrust of DEI has been to help these two underrepresented groups maintain the footholds that they have gained over the past several decades.

Other than international students, the only over-represented group comprises Asians and Asian Americans, and yet, by-and-large, they have not been part of DEI initiatives.¹² By opposing race and ethnic-based programs like DEI, the new fascists have appropriated the label of anti-racism for themselves. In other words, these are anti-racists who refuse to acknowledge the racial and ethnic disparities that already exist, a type of absolutist moral philosophy that is not anchored by a sense of context and history.

Intellectually, new fascist doctrine presents itself as simple, pure, and easy to grasp, and it requires none of the heavy lifting that its critics must resort to. Decades of theorizing about inequality and injustice have seemingly disappeared overnight, another measure of the tenuousness of the academic world.

Elections

The university system, nonetheless, is key to those parts of society that worry the new fascists the most. The college-educated from the top-tier institutions—that is, the upper and upper-middle classes—populate the corporate world, government offices, non-governmental and non-profit organizations that offer governmental services, the scientific establishment, and the public health and medical establishments, constituencies that also tend to gravitate around environmental issues and policies. What concerns the new fascists is that the universities have dominated the intellectual climate in the US for a very long time already, even if they have not dominated the means of communication (radio, newspapers, television, and the internet).

Civil society is the real target for the new fascists, with the universities representing a means to an end. The new fascist model of governance consists of a vanguard of policy-makers, flanked by a vast assemblage of technocrats who follow, but do not question, the directives they receive. The attack on the public health establishment, the firing of thousands of government employees, and the cancellation of billions of dollars in grant funding domestically and internationally are opening salvos in the struggle to eliminate this opposition.

Authoritarian regimes routinely maintain their electoral systems. Russia, Venezuela, and Turkey all conduct elections on the national (presidential), regional (state), and local levels, despite the repression to which oppositional groups are subjected. In the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, for instance, several hundred thousand people from all walks of life were arrested and some 150,000 civil servants dismissed from their positions. Yet, national elections (referendums) to rewrite the constitution occurred the next year. The mayor of the country's largest city, Istanbul, and a leading contender to replace the reigning autocratic—albeit elected—president has sat in prison for the last six months on what many consider bogus charges of corruption.¹³

Like the population at large, portions of the business class remain leery of authoritarian regimes since they represent a form of monopolistic control that favors certain economic sectors and businesses over others. In the US, this now means, among others, the gas and oil industries rather than alternative energy sources. Authoritarian regimes are also notorious for the levels of everyday corruption to which they are prone, even more so, it seems, than democratic regimes. Kickbacks, no-show jobs for relatives, and other forms of tribute become a cost of doing business. On a grander scale, top-tier law firms will perform pro bono work at the government’s discretion, and the government will receive a portion of the revenues from computer chips sold in China.¹⁴

The new fascism does not negate democracy but emerges in moments when capitalism is in trouble. Its attempt to relieve the competitive pressures that confront individual nations further intensifies the stress felt everywhere, another of the contradictions inherent in the present situation. While the political system undergoes transformation, the economic structures upon which it rests more-or-less remain as they were. Neither democracy nor fascism can escape the issues and problems that plague them both.

Thanks to Anne Lopes, Jules David Bartkowski, Fran Bartkowski, and Paul Mattick for comments.