On the American election and the question of fascism

The rise of fascism is not uniquely American. It is part of a global trend across Europe, in India, Israel, and elsewhere. What does that mean for our struggle here in the heart of empire?

Trump’s (second) election is being met with a great deal of millenarian concern about fascism, American misogyny, and so on, and I want to offer some global perspective that de-exceptionalizes this moment in the United States by situating it within broader global trends while simultaneously painting what I think is a much grimmer picture of the worldwide political moment than is commonly recognized.

A global fascist movement

There is a tendency towards American exceptionalism across the political spectrum in the US: we believe we are the world’s leading democracy, that we have the best education systems, that we are the most entrepreneurial, and so on. What’s remarkable is that this exceptionalism is rearing its head even in America’s decline: liberals have responded to Trump’s election by framing the US as unique in its democratic faltering, its misogyny, its demagoguery. There are certainly unique aspects to the US circumstance, though in my view those are mostly a function of its position of global power. But it’s a mistake to view this far-right turn as uniquely American: it has been a major political trend for at least the last decade around the world, a response to the worsening conditions and of late neoliberalism.

What do I mean when I say this? Well, as Harsha Walia pointed out on Twitter, fascists are in power in Hungary, Italy, India, Argentina, and Israel (David Sheen’s Kahanistan lecture is very much worth watching). In Germany, the far-right (and actual Nazi-linked) AfD has been steadily gaining traction over the last decade. The country’s ruling coalition collapsed yesterday and the AfD have only been made stronger by Trump’s momentum. In France’s last election, it was only a one-sided agreement by the left-wing coalition to work with Macron’s centrists that prevented Marine Le Pen’s National Rally from taking power. Macron, despite the left’s electoral victory, then forced through a right-wing prime minister and formed a center-right government that fully excluded the left. And while the UK recently swung back towards a centrist Labour government — we’ll see how long they manage to stay in power while promising austerity — the country was beset by a wave of Islamophobic, anti-migrant pogroms in August. There are other equally troubling European examples that I’m less familiar with, too.

Trump is unique in that he sits atop the most heavily armed and economically powerful country in the world — and the one with the largest nuclear arsenal — but he is not unique with regards to what his election means for western liberal democracy. He is part of a global movement.

Where did this movement come from? There are a lot of answers to this, obviously, but I’m going to focus on the one I consider the most fundamental, which happens to be the same one that answered this question in the 1930s: the colonial boomerang.

The neo-colonial and imperial boomerang

The idea of the colonial boomerang, typically attributed to Aime Césaire, is the notion that the violence of colonialism, along with the dehumanizing ideology underlying that violence, will inevitably infect the metropole, the "civilization" perpetrating it. Césaire, along with many of his contemporaries including Hannah Arendt, Albert Memmi, and others, theorized the boomerang during the immediate post-war period, wrestling with the context of the Holocaust and the beginnings of formal decolonization. These authors argued that fascism abroad — in the form of direct colonial rule — had caused fascism at home in the metropole.

Césaire illustrated the idea poignantly in his Discourse on Colonialism:

Each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread.

With a handful of exceptions, the direct colonial rule of the pre-war period no longer exists. But we still live in a world where “the west” — led, in most endeavors, by the US — exercises overwhelming, often genocidal violent power around the world. Césaire wrote that passage in 1950. His references to Vietnam were focused on the French colonial regime. But the very same line could have been written in 1968 as US troops committed My Lai after My Lai and burned the country to the ground.

The same lines could be written today, too, with just a couple substitutions:

Each time a Palestinian teenager is burned alive in Gaza, and in the United States they accept that fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread.

The argument here is a kind of ontological ratchet effect: each (horrific) death perpetrated by our countries that we turn a blind eye towards further entrenches a racial regime that allows us to classify large portions of humanity as not other-than-human. The more developed this ontology becomes, the less hold any kind of commitment to universalism or humanism has, and the further metropolitan politics continues on its path from liberal democracy towards fascism.

For those that don’t know, I am a Jewish New Yorker. One of my clearest memories related to Palestine was a dinner party where a family friend, practically foaming at the mouth, described Palestinians as “human animals” and implied that they should all be killed (for the sake of “Jewish safety,” of course). This language is openly used by Israeli leaders today, but it’s fundamental to western political discourse, too, though it’s typically masked with euphemism. Trump’s claims that migrants are eating people’s pets, among other things, are crude, but are based on this same ideology. Liberals’ choice to turn a blind eye to the Biden administration’s border policies relies on this ideology, too — an ideology of dehumanization.

This boomerang effect isn’t just ontological, it’s also technocratic: Arendt argued that in addition to the boomerang of the racial ideologies developed in the colonies, there was a boomerang of the technology of colonial — fascist — governance (“government by bureaucracy” in her words). We see this very clearly and concretely today in the form of circulations of technologies and techniques flowing between Israel and the police state in the US and Canada. Antony Loewenstein makes this argument in his book The Palestine Laboratory. Activists with the Stop Cop City movement have made this connection very clearly by pointing to the GILEE program, an exchange program that allows Georgia police to train with the Israeli Occupation Force — a common practice among police departments in North America. And of course, close to my home, activists have outlined the direct and personal links between US-led imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan and both police and private security repression of Indigenous land defenders opposing the Coastal GasLink pipeline.

I won’t go into great detail here, but it isn’t just imperialism in West Asia and the ongoing genocide of Palestine that serves as the far end of the boomerang today. Anti-migrant policies in North America, Europe, and Australia are also a central nexus for this. Each time a migrant dies in the Mediterranean or on one of Australia’s island concentration camps, or is separated from their family and deported by the US, and in the metropole they accept that fact, civilization acquires another dead weight…

Why is this boomerang important? For two reasons: first, because it means that the horrific crimes committed by our governments abroad are central to the fascist turn. And second, because it clarifies, in my view, that despite what liberal media has insisted over the last few months, the choice in this election was not between fascism and democracy. It was not even between fascism at home and fascism abroad. It was between fast fascism and slower fascism.

What does this mean for our struggle?

I think at this point, most people don’t take Francis Fukuyama’s infamous claim that the destruction of the Soviet Union marked “the end of history” seriously. A lot of history has clearly happened since 1992. But I do think that, despite ourselves, the idea has been widely internalized: it is hard to imagine that we live in a world historical moment, or maybe more specifically, it is hard to imagine that we live during a time when we can actually participate in history, whether it’s happening or not. This sense is related to, though I think separate from, capitalist realism, the idea that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

The reality — I don’t think Trump’s election changed this, though I do, perhaps näively, hope that it may wake people up to this — is that we live in an immensely critical world historical moment. The governing ideology of the last half century, neoliberalism, is collapsing. One could argue that the governing ideology of the western-built world-system, liberalism, which has five century-old roots, is also collapsing. And, to compound matters, the Earth’s ecosystem is changing more rapidly than ever before and a handful of world powers hold enough nuclear armaments to effectively destroy all life.

In other words, we don’t have a choice about whether or not we are historical actors: our historical moment has made that decision for us. We either enable the rise of a global, fascist eco-apartheid, or we fight it.

I’ll put it bluntly: things are much worse than most people have recognized, and not because of Trump’s election. And, from my perspective, they were more or less just as bad on November 4th, which means that fighting Trump’s fascism in the US has to be part of a much larger project: one of justice for (climate) migrants, climate justice, and anti-imperialism. We can’t escape the tractor beam of fascism that seems to perennially plague liberal capitalism without reckoning with and disavowing the bloodsoaked reality of American power (and “western” power writ large).

American power has been bloodsoaked for the country’s entire history, first by slavery and the genocide of Indigenous Americans; then, beginning in the late 19^th century, by hemispheric imperialism; then by our anti-communist, neo-colonial crusade during the Cold War; and finally, by the Reaganite neo-conservative foreign policy of “global policing” and “humanitarian intervention” that has come to dominate American politics today (though it is evolving in unpredictable ways). This violence has kept the country and the world order it has ruled over on a path towards fascism at all times, with steps taken forward and backward due to historical contingency. It was not, for example, by any means inevitable that we joined the Allies in World War II. Fighting fascism here — which, to be clear, is also how we work to mitigate climate change — means fighting this imperial violence from its very heart.

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The arc of history does not bend towards justice. It has to be bent that way. I’m not näive about the realities of anti-fascist struggle in the Global North: we face a tremendous task and, most likely, the Earth’s future will be won not here but in the anti-imperialist struggles of the South. But it is on us to fight for our own freedom by challenging imperialist violence abroad, at our borders, and within them. And, terrifyingly enough, the reality of nuclear armament means our struggle is profoundly important even if it is not sufficient.

I am not an expert on anti-fascist struggle. No one is: anti-fascist movements have, in world historical terms, not done that much winning in the west (again: the US involvement in the Second World War was based on historical contingency, not ideological opposition to the Nazi project). But I do think it’s important to be clear on one thing. There has been a flurry of calls, particularly from Harris’s strongest supporters, for “finding your hyper-local community” and “organizing” in the wake of Trump’s election. I don’t mean to write this off, but I do want to caution that “community” — perhaps especially “hyper-local community” — is not in itself revolutionary. It can just as easily represent an embrace of eco-fascism as a rejection of it. What we need is organizing, yes, at a hyper-local level, but committed to internationalism and connected through a united front. That means not just organizing, but organizations. And it means something very different than the Pod Save America “Resistance” of the first Trump term (which the New York War Crimes is already telling us liberals are, apparently, too tired for).

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