The Return of Antisemitism and Fascism in Western Societies
Natilyn Hicks Natilyn - Unspash
Hard truths are often hidden in grim realities.
Time and again, far-reaching events appear in societies suggesting a profound political and moral reordering of the social fabric. Yet while these events are often warning signs — flashes of impending danger — they are largely ignored by political and financial elites as well as by the corporate media, all of whom have an inclination to isolate such events and deal with them unconnected from each other. Treated in isolation, they are quickly devoured and disappear into a neoliberal-driven image society dominated by a culture of short attention spans. In a capitalist order that has turned dark and increasingly unable to deliver on its promises, social and systemic problems appear disconnected, individualized and reduced to personal narratives, and quickly disappear in a neoliberal disimagination machine that relentlessly tries to normalize an existing misery-soaked state of affairs.
Notable events, warnings and crises are now rendered digestible, insulated and politically insignificant, eliminating the necessity for in-depth analyses. This ideologically and pedagogically regressive approach to understanding the world offers no threat to the systemic capitalist relations of power and its darker mechanisms and effects, which are often hidden from view. Lost here are the connections between the pending crisis of environmental collapse, rampant inequality, the threat of a nuclear war, rising authoritarianism, collapse of civic society, rising antisemitism and the war on women's reproductive rights. When disconnected, such events do not raise enough cause for serious alarm. Under such circumstances, the disruptions that emerge out of and lead to a broader crisis are not merely overlooked but covered up. At the same time, engaged and informed critique and the critical institutions that support a strong democracy are viewed with contempt. One consequence is that such warnings quickly disappear from public attention in spite of the fact that they speak to profound changes percolating in society that necessitate a critical understanding of the emergence of new political formations, more impending forms of domination and potential modes of resistance.
The discourses of liberal, mainstream and dominant politics are too often disconnected from a fascist past and from the overlapping connections of the social problems they attempt to address. In this instance, they are marked by an analytic approach that treats issues in a disconnected and isolated manner, making such approaches incapable of making visible how various moments of violence and oppression inform and relate to each other. There is little understanding of how the attack on public schools, usually in the form of being defunded, is related to the neoliberal scourge of expanding inequality and the staggering concentration of wealth in the hands of the financial elite. Nor is the attack understood as part of a broader assault on public goods and critical institutions. At the same time, the rise of mass shootings is unrelated to a culture of violence that has been central to fascist politics — a culture that includes sports, the militarization of everything, mass entertainment and video game culture.
The discourse of mainstream politics is too often disconnected from the fascist past, and marked by an analytic approach that treats issues as disconnected and isolated.
Book banning in the U.S. cannot be removed from right-wing attempts to flood the schools with white Christian fundamentalist and white supremacist ideologies. Violence against people of color is too often disconnected from the rise of the carceral and punishing state. Attacks on the welfare state and public goods are rarely analyzed as part of the unchecked drive for profit under a savage neoliberal capitalism. The demonization of those considered unworthy of citizenship along with the rise of antisemitism, racism, xenophobia, nativism and the war against transgender youth are habitually removed from the legacy of fascism and its drive for racial purity and cultural genocide.
When the media fails to connect Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' shameful treatment of migrants and politics of disposability with the rapper Ye's use of his celebrity status to promote his virulent brand of antisemitism, and reports of former President Donald Trump dining with both Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) and an incorrigible white supremacist, it is more than a serious political mistake. It is a form of complicity that contributes to the emergence of fascist politics in the United States. Furthermore, while some pundits have connected these specific events to an emerging authoritarianism, they still fail to both name the ongoing development of fascism in the U.S. and recognize that it takes different forms in different societies and historical formations. Nor do they equate Trumpism itself with a brand of fascist politics.
As I have noted repeatedly, Primo Levi was right to state that every age reproduces its own fascism. Fascism is not some abstract idea that is permanently located in the past, it is a definable set of attributes that people such as Trump, Hungary's leader Viktor Orbán, Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi know how to exploit and magnify. As renowned historians such as Timothy Snyder, Sarah Churchill, Jason Stanley and Ruth Ben-Ghiat make clear, fascism is never entirely interred in the past; it is a dangerous ideology that may go into remission but never disappears.
Fascism is far more dangerous than authoritarianism; the latter is too general a category and does not signal the specificity of a dangerous movement that includes the current brand of fascist politics. Fascism is a recurrent and infinitely translatable phenomenon and points to atrocities, banning books and bodies, withdrawal of citizens' rights and the unimaginable horrors of the camps. As a present danger, it must be confronted. There is no room for silence or complicity. In the face of a culture with limited political horizons, it is crucial to learn from history and cultivate a critical consciousness in order to overcome the moral vacuity, manufactured ignorance and incitement to stupidity that gives rise to the fascist subject. Kelly Hayes writes in Truthout:
We must also understand that there can be no ethical silence in the face of fascism. Silence is complicity and cooperation, which helps facilitate atrocity. That might likewise be hard to hear. But how many liberals and leftists have fallen silent on trans issues as the Republicans make the elimination of trans people from public life the new centerpiece of their politics?
Authoritarian signals appear everywhere in American society. Racism, antisemitism, white supremacy, Christian nationalism, a culture of cruelty, raging inequality and an expanded politics of exclusion and disposability are burning democracy to the ground. Yet in too many cases, the larger significance of these incendiary calamities is missed because they are disconnected from each other. Examples of the landscape of disconnections and the fascist conjuncture that it supports are not difficult to find. The three seemingly disparate events I mentioned above: DeSantis' demonization of migrants, the public displays of antisemitism by Kanye West, and Trump's hosting of Nick Fuentes, a well-known white supremacist, antisemite and Holocaust denier at his Mar-a-Lago resort, received a great deal of attention but were easily forgotten.
These events were largely decontextualized in the mainstream and corporate-controlled media, treated as isolated issues, and as such illustrate the hegemonic power of a politics of disconnection. In the first instance, DeSantis ordered two planeloads of migrants from Venezuela transported to Martha's Vineyard. The two planes left from Texas filled with lawful asylum seekers who were told by DeSantis' staff that they would be provided with jobs and "up to eight months of cash assistance for income-eligible refugees in Massachusetts, apparently mimicking benefits offered to refugees who arrive in the United States through the country's official resettlement program, which the Venezuelans were not part of." They were also provided with a fake brochure titled "Refugee Migrant Benefits," although they did not qualify for such benefits.
Judd Legum reports, "Several migrants told NPR they were told the flight was going to Boston, not Martha's Vineyard. According to the migrants, a woman who identified herself as Perla also said that, if they traveled to Boston, they could receive 'expedited work papers." Legum adds, "The allegation that the migrants were misled is legally significant. It would mean that the flights were not just heartless, but potentially criminal." DeSantis was criticized in the liberal media on a number of counts, including lying, committing a criminal offense, engaging in illegal trafficking, misusing state funds, kidnaping and using this cruel stunt as a publicity device to showcase his reactionary ideology regarding immigration.
Very few analyses connected DeSantis' stunt to the long-standing policy of right-wing GOP members in propping up a white nationalist agenda. Nor did they give much attention to how the stunt smacked of a segregationist past in which White Citizens' Councils in the American South resisted activists of the early 1960s who traveled there as Freedom Riders "with the goal of integrating interstate buses and bus terminals." Not only did segregationists and armed mobs confront the freedom riders when they pulled into Southern cities "with bats and firebombs," they also "passed out leaflets and placed want ads in Southern newspapers to recruit Black families with the promise of jobs up north."