Late Fascism with Alberto Toscano

Refuse Fasccism Episode 219
Sun, Sep 29, 2024 6:17PM • 1:00:16

Alberto Toscano  00:00

In order to understand interwar European fascism itself, a detour, so to speak, through an older and in fact, also U.S.-based history, was quite vital. We need a revision of our understanding of the origins, but also the nature in a more global sense, of European historical fascism, classical fascism, that travels through those North American histories, as well as the Imperial and colonial histories more broadly. It’s part of a more complex and planetary or international circulation, but also kind of mutation of fascism.

Sam Goldman  00:36

You welcome to episode 219 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in the United States. In today’s episode, we’re sharing an interview with Alberto Toscano, author of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis.

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Before we get to my conversation with Alberto, I want to touch on some recent developments as they relate to the Republi-fascist threat. Yesterday, J.D. Vance spoke at a town hall hosted by the Lance Wallnau Show at the Courage Tour. The vice presidential candidate for the Republican Party endorsed and promoted Lance Wallnau. Who’s he? He’s the man who made the Seven Mountain Mandate popular. What’s the Seven Mountain Mandate? Well, it dictates that Christian fundamentalists are called to rule society. Lance, among other truly horrific shit, has “warned” this about Kamala Harris:

Lance Wallnau  03:34

And what you’re seeing now is a real Jezebel. You’re gonna see a lot of people saying that… it doesn’t… you know… it’s like Pentecostal 101: When you’ve got somebody operating a manipulation, intimidation and domination, especially when it’s in a female role, trying to emasculate a man who is standing up for truth, you’re dealing with the Jezebel spirit. What was accomplished was she can look presidential, and that’s — we’ll go to this later — that’s the seduction of what I would say is witchcraft. That’s the manipulation of imagery that creates an impression contrary to the truth, but it seduces you into seeing it. So that spirit, that occult spirit, I believe, is operating on her and through her, similar to with Obama, that there’s a kind of an angel of light charisma you can see at the DNC. And so when you’re up against that, the good news is, if we’re going to go full tilt, Pentecostal, Jezebel may be the spirit you’re up against, but then Trump has, like an Elijah mantle on him, probably from the intercession of a million Christians. We’ve gotta lean into this thing, because [escalated tone] the Elijah mantle can break the spell of witchcraft off America, God can tear the veil, [resumes usual tone] and unless that veil is torn, we have a lot working against us.

Sam Goldman  04:51

As Mike Hickson Ball put it: “Hard to overstate the significance of this. This is Vance’s endorsement of one of the worst, most conspiratorial Christian supremacist spectacles in the country.” Matthew D. Taylor, author of the recently released ‘The Violent Take It By Force: the Christian Movement that is Threatening Our Democracy,’ which has a chapter dedicated to Wallnau, put it like this on a recent Twitter thread.”

The Courage Tour courage is a ‘2020 election denying Christian nationalist conspiracy propagation machine masquerading as a Pentecostal style Christian revival,'” going on to write: “Even more ominous, Wallnau’s Courage Tour is operating hand in glove as a functional Trump campaign tour under the guise of a Christian ministry. Trumpist Think Tank, America First Policy Institute, is feeding Wallnau county by county voter data,” and that “the Courage Tour very much fits the pattern of partisan, spiritual warfare, conspiratorial prophesying and demonization of opponents that fed directly into the Capitol riot.” 

Speaking of wars, let’s talk about this war on migrants and asylum seekers. In recent years, the fascists have stirred up moral panics over vaccinations, over critical race theory, and any education about the real history and present day reality of this country, over trans people’s very existence. Each of these is important and devastating, and each has a role to play in developing fascist power, but when election time rolls around and shit is coming to a head, they’re going all in on immigration. 

In his piece detailing striking parallels between MAGA ideology and Republican statements about immigrants today to that of the German Nazis of the 20th century, Steven Eisenman wrote in Counterpunch this week: “Faced with two wars, nuclear confrontation, extreme economic inequality, and a climate crisis, not to mention threats to reproductive rights, forever chemicals, housing shortages, gun violence, and rising educational debt, what do 82% of Republican and 39% of Democratic voters, according to a Pew Research poll, say is the most important issue in the presidential election? Immigration.” 

This isn’t just rhetoric. In Trump’s first term, after telling you that Mexico was sending rapists and murderers, he told the Department of Homeland Security to stop prioritizing immigrants who’ve committed crimes and go after everyone. After calling the countries of the Global South “shithole countries,” his policies created extraordinarily dangerous shantytowns on the Mexican side of the border, housing thousands waiting their turn to enter and claim asylum. What he’s saying now makes that look tame. Trump labeled Muslim majority countries, “Infested”: 

He’s gone beyond accusing immigrants of crimes and claimed they are part of a broad “Conspiracy to overthrow the United States.” His words. It’s his version of the great replacement theory, where shadowy figures within the Democratic Party are bringing immigrants in to vote Democrat. But he hasn’t forgotten the crime theme. Even as natural born citizens commit crimes at a higher rate than immigrants, even as Trump himself has been convicted of multiple felonies, he is trying to convince people that, “Migrant crimes” are different and far worse than normal crimes. All in addition to channeling Hitler with his claims that brown people are:

Donald Trump  08:40

But we’re not taking them from infested countries.

Sam Goldman  08:42

When campaigning in Ohio, he said:

Donald Trump 08:43

If you call them people, I don’t know if you call them people. In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion. But I’m not allowed to say that, because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say. They say you have to vote against him, because did you hear what he said about humanity? I’ve seen the humanity and these humanity.. .these are bad… these are animals, okay, and we have to stop it.

They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia, all over the world. They’re pouring into our country. Nobody’s even looking at them. They just come in. The crime is going to be tremendous. The terrorism is going to be… Terrorism is going to be… and we built a tremendous piece of the wall, and then we’re going to build more. 

Sam Goldman  09:27

Referring to immigrants and anyone who disagrees with him as “vermin,” this is the language of ethnic cleansing, the language of genocide. It is the language one uses to foment xenophobia and violent white supremacy to seize power by hook, by crook, or by force. And it isn’t only fear mongering. He is now giving you his plan out in the open. It is now a staple of his rallies to get crowds cheering,”Send them back,” while proudly waving “Mass Deportation Now” signs. The GOP has detailed plans for how to swiftly and brutally round up and deport 11 million people.

Yesterday, Trump held a rally in Prairie Du Chien, Wisconsin, a location chosen to amplify the most vicious anti-immigrant attacks, because a Venezuelan in the U.S. without documentation was detained there in September for allegedly sexually assaulting a woman and attacking her daughter — a prime spot to wrongly and cruelly claim that all immigrants in the U.S. were violent criminals, “Stone Cold killers,” “monsters,” and “vile animals.” In front of a backdrop that read, “End Migrant Crime” and “Deport Illegals Now,” he said the following:

Donald Trump  10:42

They don’t commit crimes like us. No, no. They make our criminals look like babies. These are stone cold killers. They’ll walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.

Sam Goldman  10:53

He’s been saying that he will take back every inch from the “invasion of migrants.” And at the rally yesterday, threatened:

Donald Trump  11:02

I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs, and vicious gang members. We are going to liberate our country. I will liberate… [applause and cheers] I will liberate our nation. Our nation will be free again if we win this election, and it’s going to have to go fast, because we’re not going to be able to handle it.

Sam Goldman  11:31

Trump has pledged to have federal forces invade nearly every major American city to take over law enforcement in order to implement mass deportation. Former Trump official and project 2025 co-author Russell Vaught, the same man tapped to co-write the official 2024 GOP platform, has been working with Project 2025 to draft the Executive Orders to make these mass deportations reality once Trump takes office. One of Trump’s biggest actionable threats during his first campaign was to ban Muslims from entering the country. He didn’t get his original Muslim ban the first time around or the second, but he still got that and more.

What will he get this time if he’s allowed to sweep into power? The Democratic Party’s response is, to say the least, not a defense of immigrants. The Democratic Party leadership is reinforcing the framing that we are being inundated with undesirables at an unprecedented rate. Let’s be clear: At its root, this is not an attempt to reach across the aisle and unite with some Republicans, as reprehensible as that would be. The target of this rhetoric is you — the decent people in this country who know that immigrants are no threat.

The Democratic Party’s priority is not justice, but order. It is not justice for those forced to flee their own countries, but the order of a permanent underclass which can keep doing all the work Americans don’t want to do and keep domestic wages down. When you hear people say, “Who would take all the hardest jobs, if not for the immigrants?” it’s not a description of a just world. That’s not a warm embrace or a celebration of their humanity. This is one place where Trump actually does touch on a deep truth: Without denying a wide diversity of views amongst immigrants, all of the millions of people who have come to this country from every part of the globe, and for all kinds of reasons, do represent a threat to fascist order.

If we can overcome the political suppression they face from Republicans, Democrats and widely held American chauvinism. It’s hard to imagine defeating fascism without that. Now is the time to act with the understanding that these attacks on immigrants are the linchpin and battering ram of the whole fascist program — not allowing the vicious, lethal anti-immigrant rhetoric to go unopposed, working to defend immigrants now so that it’s clear that immigrants and refugees are welcome and it’s the fascists that must get the fuck out, and setting up plans to protect oppressed people, especially immigrants, in these coming months.

The election is nearly upon us, and nearing the peak of every election cycle for the past eight years, we’ve been inundated with the question.accusation: If Trump’s a fascist, then are you really saying that tens of millions of Americans who support him are all fascists? And we’ve heard some decent folk get defensive saying: Of course not. Playing it up to ignorance or people looking out for themselves and their family. But the answer is yes. We are saying that there is an actual fascist within a hair’s breath of winning the election come November, and those people voting for him, whatever else they may be, are fascists.

Let’s walk this through: For a significant amount of the history of the supposed greatest of all countries, you had literally hundreds of thousands of slave owners — not people who just voted for slavery, but people who actively bought, sold, owned and exploited human beings as chattel. You had quite possibly over a million who put their lives on the line for slavery in the Civil War, and that was out of a total population of one tenth of what it is today. Jump forward a hundred years, and how many open white supremacists do you think were in this country in 1960? How many fought for segregation and Jim Crow?

Jump forward another 60 years: We are living in a moment of extraordinary crisis for the American empire, with significant threats to a generally stable and relatively affluent way of life for the domestic population. In such a situation, it would be absurd to think that Americans wouldn’t double down on the white supremacy, patriarchy and, yes, American chauvinism, that are the foundation of the life we have here. Fascists are not bogeymen. They are always real, flesh and blood human beings. Yes, there are tens of millions of fascists in America today. They are not a majority. They are not immune to change, but they exist. Is it really that hard to believe?

The fact that this is so widely denied is wild. This is not editorializing. This is real, and it should be one of the top stories every fucking day. Instead, we have endless drivel about campaign stops and so called undecided voters, as if we were picking between apple pie and cherry pie. If you recognize this basic fact and the reality that they are poised to refuse anything less than a victory — prepared to fight for Trump.

If you’re wondering about what coup 2.0 could/would look like, join us for a discussion of the War Game film on October 13, 3 p.m. Eastern, 12 p.m. Pacific. You’re going to want to sign up at Patreon.com/RefuseFascism. It’s a patron only event, so sign up to become a patron to join us. In today’s interview, we discuss the nature of fascism, its historical context in the United States, and the current crises that shape its resurgence — how it is deeply intertwined with contemporary political and social dynamics and much more. Here is my conversation with Alberto Toscano.

Today, I’m honored to welcome onto the show a listener requested guest whose work I have followed for some time, Alberto Toscano. Alberto teaches at the School of Communications at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of several books and is a contributing writer for In These Times. His latest book is ‘Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis.’ Welcome Alberto, thanks for coming on.

Alberto Toscano  17:31

Thanks for having me, Sam.

Sam Goldman  17:33

Your book is a very valuable contribution to understanding the nature of fascism. America’s deep seated ideological pragmatism all too often writes off and renders moot critical analysis of fascism, meaningful conversation over its nature and even meaningful strategizing of opposition. We can see this both in liberal and so called left expressions, and we often see its mirror opposite in academic abstraction, far removed from political action. I was wondering, in basic terms: Why do we have to talk about this when we can supposedly just vote it away, or alternately, just go punch a Nazi in the face?

Alberto Toscano  18:17

That’s an excellent question. When I started working on this book, or this problem more systematically, it was precisely because I thought that, on the one hand, the public discourse, the intellectual discussion, such as it was on the eve in the wake of Trump’s election in the United States, but also in other contexts in continental Europe and elsewhere, left a lot to be desired, and that the deficit or the weakness of that debate also had practical or even pragmatic consequences.

This is a conundrum that has a very long history, or recursive history, and many of the most vital, and perhaps still vital, theorizations of fascism from the past were produced, not out of the desire to theorize for theory’s sake, but because there was a sense of urgency, but an urgency tempered by the sense that the imminent or the present threat of fascism wasn’t reason or warrant to just jettison intellectual debate or analytical precision. Actually, to the contrary, that if one were to have both an understanding of what one was confronting, but also some kind of strategy that theory was necessary — not theory, again, as an exercise for its own sake, but as a sort of crafting of the discursive and analytical weapons for long, drawn out and complicated battles with one’s adversary.

Sam Goldman  19:58

And that necessity continues. [AT: Indeed] Fascism has a long and varied history in the United States, and it’s something that many people don’t want to talk about at all, including folks who’ve come on the show. It’s oftentimes more comfortable to talk about European expressions or Latin American expressions, and veer away from this nation’s history. I was wondering if you wanted to speak to how our current moment is a continuation of that history — maybe in what ways we’re seeing a departure or perhaps a novel development to that history.

Alberto Toscano  20:37

When I first tried to kind of get my head around this issue, of course, I was responding, as many people were, to the sudden prominence of debates about fascism on the American scene, which, of course, has all sorts of culturally imperialist or dominant effects on other debates and in other countries. But my sense very quickly — and this was really consolidated by trying to track the debate on fascism amongst U.S. based Black radical and anti-colonial intellectuals — was that, in many ways, contrary to the sense which you’ve just alluded to, that somehow, because of American exceptionalism or its sui generis path, fascism was this continental European, this old world aberration, and that the U.S. had its own problems that were not usefully covered by the notion of fascism, white supremacy, settler colonialism, and so on and so forth — quickly developed a kind of sense that actually, in order to understand interwar European fascism itself — this here, I was relying on a lot of different historical and theoretical work — but in order to understand that emergence, actually a detour, so to speak, through an older and in fact, also U.S. based history, was quite vital. 

It’s a sort of reciprocal or two way relationship. I think we need a revision of our understanding of the origins, but also the nature in a more global sense, of European historical fascism, classical fascism, whatever you wish to call it, that travels through those North American histories, as well as the Imperial and colonial histories more broadly. The other side of that is to de-exceptionalize The U.S. polity itself, and to really try to think how it’s part of a more complex and planetary or international circulation, but also kind of mutation of fascism. It’s funny, because in many ways, the theories of fascism that were forged in the crucible of Black Power and Black liberation and kind of third world movements in the United States, those theories have often really been maligned as hysterical overreactions, misrepresentations of the U.S. Republic, of U.S. democracy, etc. 

But I think there are many ways very prescient and actually very useful in many respects — not just to talk about the United States, but also to talk about other contexts, and specifically to really struggle with something that I think is not just a U.S. problem today, but which is the kind of co-presence or coexistence of many of the formal and even substantive features of liberal representative democracy with intensifying and accelerating forms of racialized and gendered authoritarianism that we can link very closely to previous fascist formations. 

In some sense that U.S. history, a critical history of development of kind of sui generis forms of fascism in the U.S., is crucial if we want to break this notion that there’s this kind of tidy antithesis or contradiction between liberal democracy and fascism. Which, again, is not to engage in some politically useless and analytically idiotic kind of identification of the two, but really, to think of those kind of historical articulations and to think, you know, under what conditions are many of the realities that structure liberal capitalist societies so easily absorbed into, flipped, re-articulated into projects of violent authoritarian capitalist rule. 

I think unless we have that sensibility and ground that sensibility in our own kind of political situation or conjuncture, then we’re constantly going to be drawn into this kind of liberal common sense about the simple antithesis: more democracy equals less fascism, more elections equals less fascism, etc., etc. — or we’re just going to kind of plead our own powerlessness or not even recognize what we’re facing.

Sam Goldman  24:52

That was so helpful, Alberto. I just think that if there was more understanding of that right now, we would be in a whole different world. I’m fortunate in the sense that I get to have a lot of these discussions. An unfortunate part of that is that you see themes assert themselves over and over again, and this theme of this great democracy without any conversation of what that democracy is, and the aversion of talking about dictatorship without talking about fascism — the dictatorship that exists today, that to have that conversation and to be frank, and want to actually excavate what does run this society and how does it operate, doesn’t mean that there’s not a difference in form of rule.

Does it make fascism less bad?  I think that’s where people go. That if you want to apply any rigor to a conversation about dictatorship in this society, or what kind of democracy this is, or what does that mean, that somehow you’re bolstering the fascist movement. That’s really, really dangerous, because the conditions then continue to exist, and the crisis goes on, and you never can actually move forward. There can be no real progress in that holding pattern.

Alberto Toscano  26:11

Indeed. I think in many ways, these debates — I think at least some of this debate divides into people who think, for perhaps different reasons, that the way that our social world and our legal system and the repressive apparatuses that shore them up, are the elements of or the preconditions for a kind of fascisization, so to speak. And those who think that instead, those institutions are the antidote, and that in many ways, all that we need to do is to secure/defend a kind of liberal or constitutional status quo, and that will save us, and that therefore it’s only the aberrant or kind of illegitimate occupation, the contagion of our rule of law by mysteriously aberrant external forces that is leading to potentiality of fascism. 

So that kind of logical exception or pathology has always been a real obstacle, intellectually and politically, to confronting this phenomenon. I remember already in 2016 thinking there was a moment when really delusional kind of discourse, liberals, Democrats, I think to some extent, even Obama himself were like: Oh, well, you know, you know, once Trump comes into office, the majesty of this, like Republican institution will somehow neutralize his aberrant or bizarre and toxic position, instead of thinking: Actually, well, what is it about this institution, in this office, in this form? 

What is it about the U.S. electoral system, what is it about the U.S. Constitution itself that bears within itself, this potentiality? That this could, and indeed, did happen, rather than the sense that somehow it’s these legal norms and institutions that will keep us safe as long as we really hold to them, whatever that might mean. That’s where also you have this massive strategic asymmetry, at least in the United States, between so called liberals and then kind of increasingly far right Republican Party, with this whole galaxy of institutions and think tanks and militias, citizen’s associations and whatever, is that one side — in fact, I think as far as the legal and administrative structure of the U.S. state goes — that the ones who are really ideologically deluded are liberals, because the other side actually thinks of this as, like, a machine that can be employed and turned and twisted and transformed. 

Though they might go on and on about originalism or whatever, nevertheless, in their practice, they’re immensely canny in playing with this, and in not having any illusions about the benevolent or even the kind of homogeneous content of these institutions. Whilst I think in many ways on the liberal side that you have this intense kind of ideological fabulation where there’s something wonderful about the Constitution or something hallowed about the presidency, etc., etc. That is also one of the things that one sees play out in the United States, and that’s what also has allowed these very long term strategies on the right that have proved extremely successful and extremely damaging to social and civil liberties in general. 

Whether it’s the 50 year campaign, successful, to undermine Roe v Wade, or everything that’s happening at state legislatures and all of that, they’re very happy to play very dirty and to know that they’re doing it, and in many ways, have a much more salutary kind of cynical relationship to the legal and constitutional structure than so called liberals. That’s made a big difference to the general trajectory that the U.S. state and polity has taken, and what’s allowed, in fact, for a remarkable consolidation of very far right agendas which now rule in much of the United States. 

There’s something very peculiar to me about the almost solely presidential focus of this at times, because much of the United States is already under forms of rule that are extremely authoritarian and discriminatory for vast swaths of the population, and where the apparatuses of law. Policing, etc., don’t have anything to envy — Orban’s Hungary or whatever — but somehow the idea is like: Oh well, you know, everything hinges on the presidency — which I’m not saying it’s not extremely significant, but I also just think there seems to be an insufficient attention to that capillary, localized, kind of molecular way in which these processes have been taking place for a long time — in many ways, were always there.

It’s another kind of liberal illusion that we’re kind of entering into this situation in some kind of tabula rasa scenarios. Like: all of a sudden all these white supremacists and misogynists are coming out. It’slike: Actually, they’ve been ruling much of the United States forever [laughs], right. And also, the other thing that I think attention to those Black radical theories of fascism and perspectives from people who have been experiencing the U.S. as a state of racial domination and often of racial terror from the start, is just to break with that amnesia — to realize that for many people, the state has always been, including in its supposedly most liberal or enlightened phases, an apparatus of kind of domination. Unless we understand that, then I think we have very strange ideas about where this is coming from.

Sam Goldman  32:04

Both where it’s coming from, and therefore what the solution is, and what we do about it, and what the texture of your opposition is. I think that that’s very helpful. It is helpful to identify the obstacles in people’s thinking in order to overcome them — very quickly right now in this period. One of the things that we touched upon earlier, but I wanted to return to, is that the ascent of fascism has always been tied to various forms of systemic crisis. I wanted to give you some time to speak about: What is that crisis today? and how do these various maraudative crises shape, encourage or inhibit the development of fascism today, right now in the United States?

Alberto Toscano  32:49

I’ve been really, in some sense, kind of struggling with that question for some time, because when we think of analogies and disanalogies, or convergences and discrepancies between historical fascism and how it was theorized — after all, both Marxist theories of crises and critical theory as a intellectual tradition or discipline, in many ways, were principally focused on this quest for — certainly for the first half of the 20th century and then some. 

On one level, of course, we’ve been experiencing — certainly since 2007-08 — complicated mix of fairly classic scenarios of financial crisis, recession, downturn, impoverishment, unemployment and so on, but at the same time, not with the same temporality, not with the kind of same social phenomena, not least because we’re not dealing with a mass organized industrial working class with its political parties as in the ’20s and ’30s. We’re not dealing with these like incipient or recently defeated revolutionary situations. We’re not dealing with mass conscription. It’s like very different kind of sociology and sort of phenomenology — to that, to this. 

So, at the economic level, it’s more a very protracted situation of crisis, which some critical political economists see as a kind of ago of stagnation — not necessarily a kind of like terminal crisis, but a sort of endlessly protracted downturn with all sorts of extremely negative effects on people’s livelihoods, on people’s horizons and so on and so forth. Then, this is combined with different modalities and different kind of speeds of crisis. Whether, of course, we’re dealing with the pandemic and its consequences, or whether, in many ways, more durably and more significantly we’re dealing with climate crisis, catastrophe, collapse, as a kind of un-circumventable horizon for everything that we’re talking about, those inflect and kind of color the nature of fascist, or even authoritarian politics, and their responses today. 

One of the, I think, really significant aspects of this that kind of needs addressing, is that in many ways, what made interwar European fascism — at least the brands or branches of it that were successful in conquering state power in Italy and Germany, which are, of course, not the only ones, but — what made them successful was the buy in, so to speak, of large swathes of the capitalist or owner classes faced with either or both a sense of a possible political challenge to their power, not just on the part of revolutionary movements, but also just like mainstream reformist trade unionism and Social Democracy, and who felt — and in many ways this was materially true — who were confronted with a deep crisis of profitability or accumulation, etc., and felt that fascism was a fix — like a kind of solution that would allow them to break this crisis of profitability, of accumulation and just of kind of capitalist power, and then return to the golden days that they pined for in some respect. 

We think of who’s funding, who’s backing, who’s deeply invested in these contemporary authoritarian and/or fascistic movements, not just in the U.S., but the world over. We’re not exactly facing figures or capitalist classes that have the proletariat breathing down their neck, or who haven’t been making money hand over fist, including by the particularly lopsided ways in which governments dealt with a pandemic through quantitative easing, or the ways in which fossil fuel companies continue to be massively subsidized, all of that. In some sense what might have been in the ’20s and ’30s — not like as an excuse for the total collusion of German industrial capitalists, or Italian ones are finance with fascism — that there was a kind of pressing urgency to their desire — after having tried both in Italy and in Germany, numerous authoritarian governments still within broadly parliamentary domains, to back what was going to become, like, a dictatorial scenario. 

But that’s not where, like the Koch brothers are, like Elon Musk are at. We’re talking about levels of profitability and power that completely overwhelmed anything that the interwar period was faced withIn some sense, in many of these cases, it’s a real ideological conviction as well. It’s not necessarily obvious that yet another kind of regulatory bonfire or yet another tax cut. It’s not like they’re dealing with a life and death issue, right? So, and I think that’s quite different than the interwar period, where I think for better or for worse, many of the capitalist classes felt that this was… that, potentially, their entire mode of accumulation and of life was on the line. 

So that’s a little bit more difficult in terms of thinking of the kind of social agency that goes into our societies in many different countries — this kind of support. It’s still the case, of course, in the United States and elsewhere that many of the more, like, institutional leaders or leading figures of the capitalist class, still prefer, like, some kind of, like, more respectable conservatism or or centrism to the full on sort of predatory authoritarianism of Trump et. al., but it’s still kind of striking that you were seeing right, like, more movement from the Silicon Valley, or there’s always been a huge support, of course, in the extractive industries, because… just of the Republican Party in general, and Trump in particular; you know, the drill, drill, drill, bit of the dictatorial program. 

That’s a significant difference. At times I wonder whether, in some sense, the far right, whether in its elite or in its more plebeian forms, is a little bit, not more lucid, but in many ways, a little bit more serious about the sense that we’re entering to very critical and antagonistic times. Even though they’re not themselves facing some immediate kind of existential crisis at all, in fact, even the center or the Democrats or social democrats in Europe are still very much in a kind of neoliberal frame, so that nobody’s threatening anyone with expropriation or whatever. 

But I think there is a kind of sense of entering into times of greater social antagonism and wanting to accumulate maximum power, both in terms of resources and also in terms of political clout. Then on the other side of this trans class coalition, the more plebeian side — even though we should be careful about all these like white working class, forgotten few or whatever kind of discussions, but, on the other side — as it plays out in the anti-0migrant, xenophobic, pseudo workerist, kind of discourse, there is a sense which, again, is not as such, unrealistic, of a shrinking of resources, of possibilities, of horizons, and a kind of real pessimism which leads to this border or frontier fascism; pull up the drawbridge, resources are finite, but we want them all for, whatever, us whites, etc., etc. That’s also worth keeping in mind. 

It’s a kind of different experience and a different kind of temporality of crisis, but there’s still an attraction by various demographics or constituencies across wide income and class divides, that somehow there’s a potential, like, authoritarian fix to it. In its horrific, grotesque and pithy manner — whatever the Trump line was: I’ll be dictator for a day, and on that day I will close all the borders and drill, drill, drill — which we could engage in, the whole psychoanalytic, political, libidinal economy of these kinds of statements. But nevertheless, what does that bring out? That brings out some sense, first of all, that this isn’t a perverse way, in the horizon of questions of climate, in a kind of nihilist way; we will extract everything, for us. 

Then the sense, again, it’s a logic of sort of finite and diminishing resources, where the drawbridge, where the border is a way of imaginarily securing entitlement, privilege, and a continued kind of consumerist, kind of Imperial mode of living. The striking thing to me, in terms of contrasting the sort of structures of feeling right, of like interwar fascism and its kind of contemporary afterlives, is that where the former remained in a Imperial, colonial imaginary of expansion — with all of the catastrophic and genocidal effects that we know from the history of Nazi Germany and from Italy’s colonial history in Africa and so on and so forth — that today, actually the far right imaginary is one of closure and autarky. 

It’s, of course, still within the context in the U.S. of this imperialist state, but it’s the idea of closure, securitization et cetera, which is totally obsessive. Even the fascistic notions of purity and deportation etc. are within this imaginary that actually the resources are shrinking and we should secure all of them in competition with others. That, to me, is pretty critical to how the crisis is being mediated and experienced, and what kind of fixes these forces are presenting.

Sam Goldman  42:02

I think we see it very acutely when it comes to these intersecting crises of global warming and mass migration, largely caused by this global warming, and what that brings to bear. There’s this story, The Little Red Hen. I’m an educator, and that’s a frequent story, and this idea that more hands make easy work, that actually doesn’t work within the system that rules the society. More hands don’t make easy work. That reality is something that then, I do think, leads sections of people to think that risky gamble or not, that this fascism might be something favorable. That has to be taken on.

Alberto Toscano  43:13

Yeah, for sure. If our horizon is one of this dystopian horizon of increasing scarcity, but nevertheless of being locked into fossil extractive mode of competitive consumerism and massively unequal social distribution of wealth, then, yes, of course, that’s going to be an attractive proposition to many — because It’s a different variant. There is no alternative that we got from neoliberalism and Thatcherism — which actually was an expansive vision of this, to many, of course, an awful expansive vision, nevertheless an expansive vision of this kind of like market society — but there’s remarkable levels of skepticism and pessimism about that which are now baked in for very good reasons, including the 2007-08 crisis, and so that sense of a kind of antagonistic competition over a finite amount of resources in an increasingly finite and troubled planet translates, for many, into the attractiveness of that scenario. 

I remember I was reading recently, actually, in the wake of Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) getting these disturbingly good results in Germany, the German philosopher, critical theorist Adorno, shortly before he died, wrote this text on aspects of the new right wing extremism when the ancestor party, let’s say, the neo-Nazi Party of the 60s, had done particularly well — not as well as the AfD — in some local elections. He has a really smart passage about, first of all, this widespread sense of impending social catastrophe among the voters, kind of interpolated by the far right. 

It’s a sense of social catastrophe which is accompanied by the refusal of any political transformations that would actually change the status quo that is leading to that catastrophe — almost by saying, like, if you think there’s a social catastrophe coming, but if you refuse to challenge any social or property relations whatsoever, then the stigmatization, culpablization of those who are taking your resources, those un-entitled, those external, those foreign, those racialized, come, so to speak, naturally, because any possibility of changing the underlying parameters has been refused. Which is, of course, why this alliance between the distressed and the very rich, works very well for the latter. 

Once you’ve eliminated that possibility, then all of the so called solutions or fixes are extremely violent and exclusive by definition. We see that today — even down to the polls that I saw about the AfD — that sense, again, of catastrophe. Like 98% of the voters for the AfD apparently thought, contrary to any actual statistics, that not only crime was on the rise, but it would continue getting worse in this kind of nihilist pessimist imagining, which seems to be part and parcel. Even as we see now, all of these grotesque racist fantasies about the crimes of migrants, etc, bolster this kind of discourse, but are also, in themselves, these kind of nihilist fantasies. 

That, I think, in itself, is a symptom. So it’s not just: Who is the subject of these fantasies or who’s the object or the target of them? but: Why are they taking this form? Why are they so violent, grotesque and bearing no relationship to actual fact? It’s almost like you do have to approach these questions, yes, at the level of political analysis and strategy, but this is also like a psychoanalytic or at least like a question of political fantasy and its mobilization. Why is such enjoyment taken right in the circulation and in the voicing of these ideas?

Sam Goldman  47:01

Taking us in a slightly different direction, as election fever heightens, as Harris’s candidacy garners increasing enthusiasm, we’ve seen a peculiar resurgence of Democratic Party politics. In the past few weeks, we’ve seen Harris’s campaign re-appropriate, or more accurately, embrace elements of Trumpist politics and tropes: aggressive nationalism, complete with American flag bearing pickup trucks; endorsements from the likes of Dick Cheney being proudly announced; along with a debate performance where their candidate cheered for fracking, genocide and guns. The question, I guess, is: Is this simply pandering? and: What does this say about the state of American society in this moment?

Alberto Toscano  47:51

What it says is extremely grim and dismaying. I think the tactical — starting with less on a kind of even moral or ideological level, let’s just think tactically — as in many cases of, not the left, because there’s nothing left about Kamala Harris, but let’s say just kind of liberal centrist, or in Europe, I guess so-called Social Democrats, chasing right wing voters or right wing talking points. There’s something both desperate and just tactically, or even strategically, inept about this that baffles me. 

I don’t see that the voter nostalgic for Bush[‘s], in its own right, murderous neocon administration, and yet distressed or disturbed by Trump, is exactly what’s going to when you swing states; that announcing the support of 17 members of the Reagan administration in various states of retirement is going to get you anything that, whatever, the Lincoln Project, or Republicans against Trump. This is not a constituency, I don’t think. Definitely not a popular constituency. It’s actually, it seems to me, like entirely, a convergence of elites that are already convergent socially and ideologically and and in other ways. I found the the one that I saw recently, the ad about fighting Stalin first and fighting Putin later — this super Cold War thing, where Reagan videos and so on and so forth. 

This was already present in a much milder, but not particularly attractive key already, with some of Obama’s statements about Reagan and so on. But just at that tactical level, when you’re blatantly disregarding in the most appalling way, both the votes and indeed the experiences of Palestinian American and Arab American voters, or vast swathes of college age students that have been politicized or mobilized more ethically by the U.S. collusion in Israel’s genocide. All of this, it just baffles me. Just at the level of being a kind of fantasy campaign manager. You have this moment of like, what exactly are you doing? You have to be yourself, rather, drinking your own Kool Aid, so to speak, to think that this is an electoral strategy, because it’s an electoral strategy. 

Maybe if you’re trying to get Jake Tapper to vote for you or whatever, but it’s not an electoral strategy if you’re trying to mobilize tens of thousands of people in swing states, which I would imagine involve getting tens of thousands of people who haven’t voted before, to vote for you. This is not going to bring anyone out. That’s kind of my main sense. Of course, in many ways Nobody gets to the top of the ticket without having already been over decades, filtered through various mechanisms of ideological convergence. Yeah, some of it, I think, is fairly craven electoralism, like the fracking and so on, and I think some of it also goes very deep. 

Harris, like, again, every Democrat at the top of any presidential ticket has spoken at AIPAC conferences, and so all of that, I think, is just part of a deeper disposition. But what does baffle me is not just the crying kind of hypocrisy or disjunction between you know, this is an existential election against fascism, and, you know, let’s bend over backwards to support settler fascist genocide with everything that we have, but I’m also baffled by, actually, in some sense, how little they would have had to do to actually give people enough of a sense of difference from Biden to get them out to vote. 

That’s what I find, really dispiriting, not because I think that would have fundamentally altered the politics of U.S. empire, support for Israel, etc, but just kind of tells you just how regressive the situation is, that Kamala Harris’s U.S. administration today can’t even do something as like belated and in many ways, super cosmetic and ultimately kind of pointless, as the U.K. or Canada’s “We’re not going to sell you the thousand ton bombs. We’ll sell you the 750 ton,” or whatever Or more of a public condemnation, or anything that even cosmetically seems to do that work, which, in this instance, is in many ways far worse — or we could say if we still believed in that spectrum, to the right of the response by vile administrations like Nixon’s, or indeed Reagan’s, to whether the ’73 war or the Lebanon War, were actually much more scathing, public and consequential criticisms, like in the case of the ’73 war, at least, according to critical Israeli journalists, Kissinger is basically saying: If you keep fighting tomorrow, then the planes are going to stop arriving. And this is not even during a genocide, it’s just a relatively conventional war. 

So the fact that not even these, like minimal gestures, can conceivably be made, I find not just depressing, but scary. Because it does speak to… It’s not that I don’t think that supporting Israel is not functional to many U.S. designs. I don’t think it’s all about the Israel lobby or whatever, by any means, but I also think that there seems to be a deeper rationality and a deep kind of paralysis in the inability even to do things that would seem to be both in the interest of U.S. hegemony, frankly, and in the interest of the centrist Democratic Party securing the presidency, and therefore in the interest of all of the people, including many people in positions of power throughout U.S. capitalism, to get them to win and not have this potentially extremely destabilizing — again, also for the interest of many U.S. capitalists — fascistic regulatory bonfire of Project 2025, etc. 

I really kind of struggle with, because it does suggest that many of the transmission belts of social interest and rationality have sort of broken; that there’s nobody capable of pushing, not in a progressive, not in a direction that would even remotely respect international law, etc., but just in a direction that wasn’t based on such irrationally extreme support, in this case, of Israel. Had they done something like, which I would have found still appalling and hypocritical, etc., at least it would have made sense to me. Like, if they’d done what Trudeau did nine months after this genocide began, like: Oh, we won’t sell you the big weapons, etc. 

Obviously, I don’t think this is respectable or does anything, but it makes sense to some idea of a kind of Imperial liberalism. The carte blanche eleven months into this does not make sense to me at the level of U.S. foreign policy interests, it does not make sense to me in terms of the Democratic Party’s own, I would imagine, desire to retain power. So that’s what the refusal to have a vetted speech by a totally Palestinian American Democratic politician who’s totally endorsing Harris or whatever. You’re not even doing that. Again, it seems very symptomatic of a pathological condition in that regard, for want of a better word.

Sam Goldman  55:16

Alberto, I want to thank you so much for coming on and this conversation and for sharing your insight, your perspective, your expertise. If you are listening, you can find a link to the book in the show notes. Besides directing listeners to your book and author page on In These Times, where else would you want to direct people to if they want to read more of your work or connect with you?

Alberto Toscano  55:43

I teach at Simon Fraser University, so some of that information is on the University website. I also edit books for the Calcutta based publisher, Siegel Books — both a list of essays and a list of translations from the Italian. So you can look there, and I’ve written a decent amount for the New Left Review over the years. So that’s another place, including a recent piece on a very important book by a Palestinian scholar and critical theorist Haidar Eid, called Decolonizing the Palestinian Mind, written from Gaza in the fall of this year.

Sam Goldman  56:16

Thanks so much.

Sam Goldman  56:22

Before we end today’s episode, we have to talk about Lebanon as this escalation occurred after Alberto and I spoke. Israel has expanded their genocidal war northwards. It is simply indefensible, except from the logic of Empire and the worldview that paints the West as under siege from barbarian terrorists. There is so much to be said, but I’d like to make a particular point in relation to the fascist threat this show exists to address. These actions expose how many ways fascism lies right under the surface of capitalists’ “democracy.” After all, it has been the normal functioning of U.S. democracy that has brought Trump to the fore. The normal functioning of U.S. democracy relies on white supremacy, patriarchy and American chauvinism. 

The normal functioning of the U.S. government is maintained by war. For over a century. It’s been the normal functioning of U.S. democracy to support genocidal and fascist regimes the world over, from the Philippines to Saudi Arabia, from apartheid Africa to the Shah of Iran. Israel has now bombarded Beirut and southern Lebanon, killing at least 500 people, including at least 50 children. All in clear violation of international law. It is the normal functioning of U.S. democracy that provided those bombs and missiles. Joe Biden called the blitzkreig “a measure of justice.” When the United States echoes Israel’s claims that it is the only democracy in the Middle East, more than exposing them as liars, this claim should expose what these people mean by democracy.

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