The inchoate breed of fascism emerging today thrives on disasters, chronic and acute. Today’s far right is not yet fascist, or not-yet-fascist. It does not organize paramilitaries with the aim of overthrowing electoral democracy and destroying political freedom. Rather, it has a thin, networked civil society base whose energies are wrapped around culture wars that occasionally explode into the meatspace violence of lone-wolf murderers, vigilantes, riots, pogroms, and pseudo-insurrections. Its elected leaders such as Modi, Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Orbán, Milei, and Netanyahu direct their aggression not at electoral democracy, but at the liberal state. They have at times unleashed popular violence in an offensive on bourgeois legality, but the aim is to effect a constitutional rupture that tilts the balance of rule toward authoritarian democracy rather than outright dictatorship.
The fascism that is being prepared through this sequence will not resemble classical fascism. The world that made fascism–colonialism, class civil war, revolution, and intense industrial modernization–has passed. The new world is one in which the big questions will be those raised by the climate crisis: who gets what and who does without, who lives and who dies. Neonate fascism, whether green or brown, is preparing the terrain for a war on what it sees as mutant or out-of-place biology: the migratory or criminal.
According to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, classical fascism liberated a popular desire for suicide: its fulfilment was not the fabulated Reich stretching from Western Europe to East Asia, but the Nero decree ordering the destruction of German infrastructure as the Nazis’ final act. Today’s incipient fascisms metabolize the mulch of misery into a form of collective excitement tending toward the ecstatic brush with death that is the metier of the lone-wolf murderer. Wholly lacking the utopian aspects of interwar fascism, with its idea of refining the species through brutal demographic culls and improving living standards through colonial expansion, it is today, more nakedly than ever before, a suicidal programme.
Let me begin with a contemporary disaster story. In the summer of 2020, the U.S. state of Oregon witnessed a wildfire bigger than anything in living memory–so far. Winds blew wildfires into megafires, and downed power lines to create more fires, burning at up to 800C. Ten percent of the state’s population was forced to evacuate. Thousands of homes were destroyed. Thirty-three people were killed.
This acute disaster came hard upon a series of chronic disasters: the financial crash of 2008 was followed by economic depression, soaring poverty rates and joblessness especially in rural counties, pervasive alcoholism, the highest addiction rates in the United States–before the fentanyl crisis took off–and a surge of suicides. We often hear that disasters bring people together: the “city of comrades”, the “democracy of distress”, or what Rebecca Solnit calls “disaster communities”. It isn’t necessarily so. Kai Erikson, a sociologist specializing in disasters, found not a single example of this. If it happens, it happens only where the community wasn’t already riven with ethnic and class fault lines. Erikson found that in most scenarios, acute disaster compounds chronic disaster.
The chronic disasters–of poverty, addiction and public squalor–creep around and shut down a person’s defences without them noticing. When the acute disaster comes, she is in no position to resist. She instead experiences something akin to a “psychological concussion”, a “dull silence”, a retreat to the survivalist enclaves of life. And hopelessness–apocalyptic hopelessness. They share the sense that some bleak truth about the world has been horribly and irreversibly disclosed.
Loving Catastrophe: The Spectre of Disaster Nationalism
Yet, today’s far-right loves disaster. In a world where disasters are not exactly scarce, they can’t stop fantasizing about imaginary disasters: the “Great Replacement” in which migrants will allegedly swallow up white Euro-American societies, the “white genocide” that will be its supposed result, the “Great Reset” favouring globalist elites after Covid, the “gender ideology” that is said to be a plot to destroy Western masculinity from Eastern Europe to Latin America, the “cultural Marxists” plotting sedition from within, and, in India, the “Romeo Jihad” in which deviant Muslim men seduce and convert Hindu girls as part of a thousand-year-old war on the Hindu nation. They love raging and pogroming against imaginary disaster.
In Oregon, this took the form of a spontaneous, mass apocalyptic fantasy spread through social media networks–because there is scant local news in these rural areas–and then echoed by figures in authority, from local police to Donald Trump. Since 2017, rumour had it that a seditious group called “Antifa” was planning a massacre of white, conservative Christians to impose a liberal tyranny. In 2020, they looked at the Covid lockdown and said, this is the tyranny we have been warning of. They looked at Black Lives Matter and said, this is the sedition we’ve been warning of. They’re burning the cities–they’re coming for us.
The rumour spreads that Antifa is the cause of the fires: it’s too weird, the conspiracists say, there are too many fires. Someone is doing this to us. The fires are caused by terrorists and paid mercenaries of the Democratic Party. Vigilantes set up armed checkpoints. Some people refuse to evacuate. A man told to flee for his life says: “I’m protecting my city. If I see people doing crap, I’m gonna hurt them.” This is an exciting alternative to fleeing disaster. It’s not exciting to undergo disaster. But, as Michael Billig’s work on the psychology of British fascism shows, it can be exciting to be threatened by people.
For official liberalism in the West, the cliff-edge moment was the year 2016, when Trump was elected and the UK voted to leave the European Union. Yet that is to focus misleadingly on electoral and institutional outcomes. These are the results of a social and emotional contagion decades in the making.
Why? Psychoanalytically, it allows something that is already there to enter conscious experience: the sense of threat. Politically, it allows you hit back. Because you can’t shoot capitalism or climate change, even if you acknowledge them: they’re abstract forces, difficult to deal with. But you can shoot Antifa, and Black Lives Matter, and then go to the Capitol in Washington, DC, and string up the “communists” in charge. It’s exciting. Of course, it solves nothing because, like any symptom, it exists to avoid the solution. It is part of an addictive cycle of threat and release.
Disaster nationalism, as an alternative to the pervasive depression borne of the chronic decay of liberal civilization, is much more effective than CBT or happy pills. It says, “Those demons in your head, are real: and you can kill them.”
Fascist Antitotalitarianism
In recent years, there have been a series of botched, far-right pseudo-insurrections. Less than a year after the riots in Washington, DC, on 6 January 2021, an alleged coup attempt by the neo-Nazi Reichsbürger movement was thwarted in Germany. In the following months, supporters of defeated Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro stormed government buildings in the hope of triggering an “intervençāo military”. Then, in Russia, members of the paramilitary Wagner Group led by Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin marched halfway to Moscow to force out the military leadership they blamed for betraying their war on the “hohols” (a racist slur for Ukrainians). In every case, the uprising was precipitated by conspiracist paranoia. More tellingly, in most cases the dirty work of finishing the coup was supposed to be carried out by the “good guys” in power.
A similar logic sustains the outbursts of vigilantism in the U.S. and Brazil, pogromism in India and the West Bank, and the volunteer anti-drug death squads in the Philippines. Popular violence is conducted alongside and with the indulgence or aid of the state’s violence professionals. It supports far-right administrations and their supporters in the repressive apparatuses, going farther than they can within their present legal constraints, while widening the opportunities for further state violence. It is not simply countersubversive, but aimed diagonally at what it perceives as a split in the state between a treasonous and legalistic establishment and the traditionally repressive and authentic authorities whom it supports.
Another aspect of contemporary far-right disaster disinfotainment, from QAnon to Querdenken, is how it often positions itself as a species of “anti-totalitarian” thought defending traditional individual liberties. It is terrified of claims to the “social” or “collective”. Just as “Red Rosa” was a figure of terror for the Freikorps, at least according to Klaus Theweleit, so today’s far right is appalled by the blue-haired female “social justice warrior”.
At the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, we were warned that “social distancing is communism”, and that Covid health interventions were the necessary preliminaries of a new “Fourth Reich”. This “sociophobia”, as Wendy Brown dubs it, indicates the extent to which today’s far right has been penetrated by neoliberal political economy. Although they resent the institutional forms of neoliberalism as overweening “globalism”, they share the anti-democratic, anti-welfare, and rigorously competitive elements of its vocabulary. From Viktor Orbán and Marine Le Pen to Narendra Modi, far-right leaders have even experimented with authoritarian versions of neoliberalism. This also helps explain why some who had been bien pensant progressives during the neoliberal era turned to the far right during the pandemic: the mythical “sovereign individual” had abruptly become countercultural, and they experienced a queasy sense of normality slipping away.
None of this is entirely novel. In a way, a blueprint for fascist “antitotalitarianism” had already been supplied in the founding conspiracist manuals of Abbé Barruel and John Robison, blaming the French Revolution on illicit networks of Templar or Freemason power. From the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the “New World Order”, to the syncretic millenarianism of QAnon and Querdenken, the most violently authoritarian politics begins in the fantasy of an occult despotism threatening human freedom. Fascist intellectuals such as Pierre Drieu de La Rochelle and José Antonio Primo de Rivera were enthralled and terrified by the image of the individual being submerged in the mass. Rochelle would “kill off statism by making use of the state”, while Rivera reviled Marxism because he feared “being an inferior animal in an ant-nest”.
Yet neoliberalism has profoundly changed today’s far right. There is no hint of the “class transcendence”, of which Michael Mann wrote, in today’s incipient fascisms. While interwar fascists felt the need to promise serious reforms to change the spiritual meaning of class, to nationalize it, today’s far right embraces muscular capitalism shorn of “woke” and “politically correct” constraints. Even the weak animus against “globalism” is specific to the far right in the Global North: in rising middle-income countries like India, Brazil, and the Philippines, far-right governments embrace globalization. Aside from occasional cash transfers distributed on a clientelist basis, all the contemporary authoritarian right is willing to offer is some national protections against migrant competition. Even that is subordinate to the more potent and overriding offer: the chance to destroy a neighbour.
Violence Works
The convection cells of this storm have long been in view. For official liberalism in the West, the cliff-edge moment was the year 2016, when Trump was elected and the UK voted to leave the European Union. Yet that is to focus misleadingly on electoral and institutional outcomes. These are the results of a social and emotional contagion decades in the making. In the “s-curve” of contagion, the critical inflection point would have been around the time of the 2008 financial crash.
The trends maturing today began right in the era of peak liberalism, the endlessly misremembered 1990s. When Hindu nationalists demolished the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, Pat Buchanan made a breakthrough for the nativist right in the Republican primaries, and Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party came second in the Austrian elections. They were accelerated by the “war on terror”, during which the liberal state was hardened by practices of torture, kidnapping, police shootings, renewed ethnic repression, and worldwide civilizational combat. However, while the Islamophobia climate drove up the far-right vote across Europe, the ethnonationalist alliances forged under that rubric, from Narendra Modi’s pogrom in Gujarat to Ariel Sharon’s flattening of the West Bank, showed that the real innovators of the new far right would be in the Global South. In the analysis of fascism, as in so much else, it is time to provincialize Europe.
In North America and Europe, the 2008 financial crash–metabolized as a series of sovereign debt crises and austerity experiments–hardened civil society through the relentless monstering of the undeserving poor, migrants, and minorities. As excess deaths soared thanks to these programmes, the cause of death would mostly have been recorded as heart disease, diabetes, or drug overdose–the proximate political causes were obscured. Yet for those who noticed that life was deteriorating but lacked an intuitive political explanation, official discourse provided one. The “white working class” had, it was explained, been “abandoned”. The operative term here was “white”: these workers were not exploited or oppressed, but denied a certain recognition they had historically enjoyed as whites thanks to the overzealous efforts of governing liberals to recognize minorities. The unhappiness of assorted downwardly mobile class strata was ascribed to a kind of ethnic usurpation.
Most people, most of the time, do not vote with their wallets: and the new far right has repeatedly demonstrated that they will gladly take a hit for the chance of a symbolic win.
Amidst the ensuing social decomposition, there followed the rise of militias, cyber-fascism, and anomic lone-wolf fascism. Internationally, the crisis of imperialism in Iraq gave us the garishly nihilistic “Islamic State”. Globally, it is the involution of liberal civilization and the pervasive affects of depression and resentment that it generates that has birthed the new far right.
In electoral terms, the real breakthrough was not Brexit (a regional misfortune) or Trump (an excrescence of imperial decline), but Narendra Modi’s victory as Prime Minister of India in 2014. His role in the brutal, sanguinary ecstasies of an Islamophobic pogrom was forgotten, his visa rights restored. The “Gujarat development model”, built on the back of that pogrom and the political success it enabled, was celebrated by Obama and the business press as a model of economic success. The essence of that fabled success was: slash welfare, health, and education to fund business subsidies for development.
What this demonstrated was that popular violence was not an embarrassment or an electoral weakness for the far right, but a unique selling point. The Indian far right really discovered the specific conjuncture of muscular capitalism, murderous ethnonationalism, and Islamophobia–what, following Deleuze and Guattari, we might call a “resonance machine”–that came to define the post-millennium European far right.
Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), having been expected to lose the coming legislative election in Gujarat in 2002 after its catastrophic mishandling of an earthquake, saw its vote rise by 5 percent after the pogrom. This established the political foundation for Modi’s version of capitalism with pogromist characteristics. The ensuing successes of Donald Trump on a white nationalist programme, Rodrigo Duterte on a pledge to murder millions of drug addicts, and Jair Bolsonaro on the back of a Brazilian establishment soft coup against the Workers’ Party, all profited from that example.
It Isn’t the Economy, Stupid
Disaster nationalism has upended the political orthodoxy of the governing centre. For years, we had been ruled by a false idea, inherited from classical political economy, of enlightened self-interest. This only described how people ought to be governed, pitting avaricious passions against seditious passions. Most people, most of the time, do not vote with their wallets: and the new far right has repeatedly demonstrated that they will gladly take a hit for the chance of a symbolic win.
Yet even after years in which economic threats and the experience of dismal incumbencies has done little to damage the far right electorally, one frequently encounters the idea that neonate fascism is in some way a distorted expression of “neglect” or of “interests” not met. The Left has its versions of this story, where “identity” issues have been allowed to squeeze out the real, universal “bread-and-butter” concerns of the majority. Yet those who do vote, riot, or kill for the right show little sign of being especially disenfranchised or poor. There is some evidence that they have experienced personal trajectories of class decline, or that they are embedded in declining regional economies. But millions of people have their lives wrecked by capitalism all the time without radicalizing to the right.
Nowhere does today’s far right, having abandoned all trace of utopianism, pretend to be anticapitalist.
To understand this moment, we need to look again Marx’s account of the passions: passion as humanity’s fundamental relationship to its object. We need to look at the role–in a context of relentless social comparison and steepening inequality, the extolment of winners and sadism toward the losers, where the costs of failure are increasingly psychologically toxic–of persecutory and vengeful passions. It is not enough to talk about disinformation, as if the problem were the excessive credulity of a susceptible audience. There is disinformation out there, but it thrives on a lack of trust: the credibility crunch experienced by authority. Most of what we know, we get from others: if we cannot trust, we cannot know. In a crisis of trust, where neoliberalism says everyone else is a competitor and a risk to be managed, and everyone is out to get you, many are turning toward cultures of DIY investigation.
The problem is how these politically ambiguous cultures, which in the 1990s exhibited a curiosity and openness to the “alt” and the “alien”, and in the early 2000s seeped into anticapitalist and anti-war movements, have been assimilated and weaponized by the far right for cyberwar. The point is not simply to misinform for grift or electoral advantage, but to activate wayward vengeful passions against well-selected enemies, to destroy their reputations, careers, and even cause them to be killed. Modi “reward follows” his favourite trolls, and his team has target lists of enemies to be fed to the trolls. Bolsonaro ran an “Office of Hate”. Duterte organized mass-distributed campaigns of sexual harassment and death threats against opponents before jailing them or having them murdered.
Taking us further away from the idea of enlightened self-interest, these vengeful fantasies are ensconced in the far right’s erotica: their visions of extreme sexual evil–elite paedophilia, bathroom predators, Romeo Jihad by Muslims seducing Hindu girls, gender ideology brainwashing children against masculinity, the Chads and Stacys and Tyrones with their sexual tyranny over lonely, sexually isolated males–are not simply conservative. They are brutally transgressive. Men’s rights fora revel in rape and paedophilia. Andrew Tate fans support rape and sexual slavery. Modi became a sex symbol in Gujarat after the pogrom he incited.
Why? Because in their bleak purview, someone always gets violated–it’s just a question of who. As a female Hindutva activist explained about the rape of Muslim women in India: “They have raped so many of us, we must now rape some of them.” The far right’s critique of communism is that they want to violate and humiliate the wrong people. Disaster nationalism seeks a redistribution of violation and humiliation.
The Dialectic of Mutual Radicalization
This is why violence becomes a unique selling point. The Gujarat pogrom followed an imaginary “genocide”: a fire on a train that killed dozens far-right Hindu activists, and was later found to have been the result of an accident, was immediately described by local authorities as a genocidal attack by thousands of Muslims firebombing the train. BJP officials, local police, and businessmen helped Hindu activists hunt down, torture, rape, burn, cut to pieces, and kill Muslims, including their infants.
This same libidinal pattern can be seen in the Philippines, where Duterte’s death-squad populism kept his approval ratings at over 90 percent no matter what else he did, despite the fact that most voters also said they feared they or someone they knew might be killed. The violent purge of the undeserving poor was marketed to the nation as economic uplift: let us violate and destroy the wretched and broken, and your grandmothers will feel safe on the streets, businesses will invest and the country will grow.
We are beyond enlightened self-interest. There is a relation between this violence and far-right political economy. Nowhere does today’s far right, having abandoned all trace of utopianism, pretend to be anticapitalist. Not only has it internalized the predicates of neoliberalism, it has also benefited from a curious symbiosis with the neoliberal centre. They overlap in their interest in cultivating both hopelessness and vengeful passions: sado-pessimism. They differ only in that they are prepared to enable the enlivening outbursts of demotic violence fostered by these passions, rather than contain them and expect people to passively enjoy the cruelty of the state as it targets migrants and protesters.
The end, the telos of this process, is genocide.
A fatal tipping point is what I will call the dialectic of mutual radicalization. The armed base, egged on by the leadership, engages in shock attacks on the enemy. It goes farther than the state legally can. The leadership defends it, supplements it with official violence, and ups the rhetorical ante. This encourages the base to go further.
A minor example of this dynamic would be the sequence arising from the Black Lives Matter uprising in 2020. Trump exhorted the vigilantes with the famous segregationist slogan, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. When Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed several antifascist protesters, Trump and his allies made him the poster boy for suburban revenge. His defence was supported by right-wing fund-raisers. Then, Trump despatched federal paramilitaries to abduct protesters on the streets and extrajudicially execute a man, Michael Reinoehl, who was suspected in the shooting of a far-right activist. This was the necessary prelude for the wannabe “insurrection” on 6 January.
The end, the telos of this process, is genocide. In Israel, the symbiosis between the bourgeois centre and the far-right is also, because of its importance to Western foreign policy, a global coalescence. In Gaza, an army of 20-something men–hankering for revenge and a thorough redistribution of humiliation after the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023 known as the “Al-Aqsa Flood”, primed for genocide from every quarter of society, socialized in a dehumanizing state, and enjoying themselves immensely according to their social media postings–operate without written rules of engagement. Whatever is not expressly forbidden is assumed to be permitted.
They are the products of a state in decline: the post-war nationalist utopia won through the originary bout of ethnic cleansing known as the Nakba has been collapsing for decades, leaving an increasingly unequal, pessimistic society prone to messianism. Being young, they will be disproportionately represented among the dati leumi and secular far right. Many of them do not want to leave Gaza and think the annihilation of Amalek is proceeding too slowly. According to Ha’aretz, the rank and file have been in de facto insurrection against the military leadership from the earliest months of the war. Meanwhile, in Israel, anyone who ventures even a humanitarian critique of the war risks being sacked, hunted by fascist mobs, or tossed in solitary confinement.
This is what they’ve been waiting for: the internal traitors will be killed, the neighbour destroyed. And the liberal fellow-travellers will either follow them all the way down this road or be destroyed too. This is what it is to live in a dying civilization.
This article originally appeared in LuXemburg.