i was thinking about this yesterday while i was locking up my bike to go to the ATM. i don't even know what i mean when i say facism really. have always been confused about the word coz i don't know that period of history well at all. weird how you start reaching for these terms.
There was an article published in the New Statesman last year which called whatever's going on atm 'disaster nationalism'...
As for the left, our conversation is often garbled by inadequate abstractions, be it the academic discourse of “populism” or the uninformative, parochial American pseudo-debate about whether Trump is really a “fascist”. As Marx would have said, the correct method is not to start with the abstraction but to “appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development and to track down their inner connection”.
What is distinctive about this new far-right and its growth? Notwithstanding wannabe “insurrections” in the United States, Brazil, Germany and even Russia, it remains largely parliamentarist for now. The new far-right provides an advantageous milieu in which neo-fascists can thrive but its immediate objective is not the overthrow of electoral democracy but a constitutional rupture breaking with all humane and “woke” constraints on the exercise of power. In most cases it starts out poorly organised, with meagre civil society roots, achieving what it does with an assemblage of online networks, media connections, sporadic street mobilisations, dark money, electoral campaigns and random violence. The one salient exception is India, where the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) gives Modi paramilitary heft. Otherwise this movement thrives less on its own inherent dynamism than on the decomposition of the old parliamentary centre, and on lurid apocalyptic fantasies: “white genocide”, “the great replacement”, “the great reset”. It is not yet fascism, but something else, which we might term “disaster nationalism”.
Disaster nationalism evinces not the least trace of the utopianism of historical fascism, with its colonial fantasies of living space and a “new man” equipped for global domination by race science. Rather, apart from the Israeli far-right’s expansionist vision for Gaza and the West Bank, it offers a meagre, defensive nationalism scaled to an age of deflationary politics. It doesn’t feign anticapitalism or proffer what Michael Mann calls “class transcendence”, as fascists did in both Italy and Germany. To the contrary, it defends a more muscular capitalism freed from “woke” constraints, albeit with ethnic protections. There is no sense of the futurist Aufbruch (departure) that Roger Griffin says characterised interwar fascism, apart from the pathetic, suicidal romance of the lone-wolf manifesto. Tomorrow doesn’t belong to them; they don’t want tomorrow. On the flipside of their obsession with disaster scenarios is nostalgia for a version of normality that is slipping away.
The modern far-right is not a return to fascism, but a new and original threat.
www.newstatesman.com