Talk of a fascist politics emerging in the United States is often criticized as either a naive exaggeration or a failure to acknowledge the strength of liberal institutions. Yet, the case can be made that rather than harbor an element of truth, such criticism further normalizes the very fascism it critiques, allowing the extraordinary and implausible to become ordinary. After decades of the neoliberal nightmare both in the United States and abroad, the mobilizing passions of fascism have been unleashed unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. The architects and managers of extreme capitalism have used the crisis of economic inequality and its “manifestly brutal and exploitative arrangements” to sow social divisions and resurrect the discourse of racial cleansing and white supremacy.[1] In doing so, they have tapped into the growing collective suffering and anxieties of millions of Americans in order to redirect their anger and despair through a culture of fear and discourse of dehumanization; they have also turned critical ideas to ashes by disseminating a toxic mix of racialized categories, ignorance, and a militarized spirit of white nationalism. While there is no perfect fit between Trump and the fascist societies of Mussolini, Hitler, and Pinochet, “the basic tenets of extreme nationalism, racism, misogyny, and a hatred of democracy and the rule of law” are too similar to ignore. [2]
In this instance, neoliberalism and fascism conjoin and advance in a comfortable and mutually compatible project and movement that connects the exploitative values and cruel austerity policies of casino capitalism”[3] with fascist ideals. These ideals include: the veneration of war, anti-intellectualism; dehumanization; a populist celebration of ultra-nationalism and racial purity; [4] the suppression of freedom and dissent; a culture of lies; a politics of hierarchy, the spectacularization of emotion over reason, the weaponization of language; a discourse of decline, and state violence in heterogeneous forms. Fascism is never entirely interred in the past and the conditions that produce its central assumptions are with us once again, ushering in a period of modern barbarity that appears to be reaching towards homicidal extremes. [5]
The deep grammar of violence now shapes all aspects of cultural production and becomes visceral in its ongoing generation of domestic terrorism, mass shootings, the mass incarceration of people of colour, and the war on undocumented immigrants. Not only has it become more gratuitous, random, and in some cases trivialised through the monotony of repetition, it has also become the official doctrine of the Trump administration in shaping its domestic and security policies. Trump’s violence has become both promiscuous in its reach and emboldening in its nod to right-wing extremist groups. The mix of white nationalism and expansion of policies that benefit the rich, big corporations and the financial elite are increasingly legitimated and normalised in a new political formation that I have termed neoliberal fascism.[6]
I am not suggesting that all conservative politicians, including right-wing elements of the Democratic Party such as the Clinton/Obama wing, support the same reactionary policies embraced by Trump and his followers. In fact, Democratic Party politicians from Hillary Clinton and Obama to Feinstein and Pelosi actually profess to be a counter force to Trump—often labelling themselves as the party of resistance—but in the long run, they end up supporting neoliberal policies and power relations that favour the ruling elites. If one is willing to throw some light on the historical amnesia that the current crop of democratic presidential hopefuls appear to embrace, it becomes clear that previous Democratic Party policies under Clinton and Obama paved the way for Trump. Clinton signed a draconian crime bill in 1994. The bill slavishly indulged the then “national frenzy” for law and order as a form of punishment and enacted policies such as “three strikes,” “truth in sentencing,” and “mandatory minimums.”[7] The bill was also responsible for implementing tsunami of mass incarceration that destroyed lives, families, and mostly black communities. At the same time, Clinton signed on to NAFTA, and deregulated the financial industry. The class and racist thread that connects these two bills is shamefully obvious. Fast forward to the Obama presidency. Rather than challenge the utopian greed of a savage capitalism, Obama turned hope for the many into hope for the bankers and financial elite and hopelessness for millions of Americans who had lost their homes during the 2008 economic recession. Rather than bailing out people who suddenly found themselves in massive debt and prosecuting the financial elite who caused the economic crisis, Obama bailed out the bankers who rewarded themselves with big bonuses and even bigger profits. He also sold billions of dollars of military arms to Saudi Arabia.
As Mike Davis and Daniel Monk once put it, “the Champaign days of the Great Gatsby have returned with a vengeance” and we cannot put the entire blame on Trump and his Vichy Republican Party gravediggers.[8] Unfortunately, the political proponents of fanatical capitalism are still with us in the likes of a number of Democratic Party presidential candidates that extend from Joe Biden who “once opposed busing to desegregate his state’s public schools”[9] to Beto O’Rourke who refused to even label himself as a progressive.[10] There is no talk among these candidates for addressing massive financial and social inequality, redistributing wealth to the working and middle classes, or dismantling the power of the criminogenic financial and cultural institutions modelled after Goldman Sachs.
Under such circumstances, these alleged “liberal” politicians, not unlike the German-Socialist in the Weimer Republic, turned their back on the needs of workers, the poor, minorities of class and color, and in doing so helped to create a populist revolt that supported the anti-elitist, anti-government discourse on which Trump ran his presidential campaign.[11] It is worth noting that I am arguing that neoliberalism is intrinsically fascist as much as I am insisting that it created the conditions, particularly in the wake of the Trump regime, for an updated form of fascist politics in the United States.
The urgency of addressing the rise of fascism both in the United States and abroad might begin with the regime of untruth and manufactured illiteracy that allows and normalizes the catastrophic conditions that make neoliberal fascism a potent source of identity, fantasy, and pleasure. One place to start would be a critical analysis of the Trump administration’s efforts to abandon and discredit traditional sources of evidence, facts, and analysis in its attempt to normalize fake news, a culture of lying, and the world of alternative facts. At issue here is making visible a radical new relationship between the public and truth and the ensuing demise of civic culture and the public institutions that make it possible. As the public’s grip on civic literacy weakens, language is emptied of any substantive meaning and the shared standards necessary for developing informed judgements and sustained convictions are undermined. In a world where nothing is true, all that is left to choose from are competing fictions. One consequence is that everything begins to look like a lie. As the historian, Timothy Snyder points out “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.”[12] More startling is the assumption that what matters in an age of deep divisions, exploitation, and precarity is not whether something is true or false but the promise of a consistent narrative in which people can recognize themselves while willing to “abolish their capacity for distinguishing between the truth and falsehood, between reality and fiction.”[13] Of course, there is more at stake here than the creation and normalization of a culture of lying and what Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord and others identified as the theatricalization of politics, there is also the threat to democracy itself.
We do not live in a post-truth world and never have. On the contrary, we live in a pre-truth world where the truth has yet to arrive. As one of the primary currencies of politics, lies have a long history in the United States. For instance, state sponsored lies played a crucial ideological role in pushing the US into wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, legitimated the use of Torture under the Bush administration, and covered up the crimes of the financial elite in producing the economic crisis of 2008. Moreover, we have been living the lie of neoliberalism and white nationalism for over forty years and because of the refusal to face up to that lie, the United States has slipped into the abyss of an updated American version of fascism of which Trump is a both symptom and endpoint.
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