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What is fascism in the 2020s?

I thought Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? was an excellent read, even if it feels like a rehearsal for an upcoming theory book as much as a genuine trade book. The account of fascism in the final chapter seems particularly significant to me. Even if it is not reading entirely new ground it is exploring it with a clarity that is still too rare.

The underlying intuition is that we need to understand the nascent authoritarian coalition in terms of “economic formations that have left many people radically insecure about their futures, sensing that the conditions of their lives are deteriorating” (loc 4349). This includes “the felt sense that the earth as we know it will not be able to survive climate destruction” (loc 4433). The authoritarian coalition tells a compelling story about this unravelling, in which a chain of phantasmic threats are linked together as enemies attacking from inside (e.g. the globalists) and enemies chipping away at us from within (e.g. trans activists) in some loosely coordinated, yet terrifyingly effective, plot. But it does so in a way which enables a simultaneous release from repression (loc 4450):

All of the contemporary authoritarians promise a “liberation” from a leftist superego that would affirm trans lives, “woke” culture, and feminist and anti-racist struggles. This shameless attack on progressive social movements unleashed a “liberation” from moral accountability and an entitlement to privilege and power that, in turn, demonstrated its triumph by destroying the basic rights of migrants, queer people, women, Black and brown people, and the Indigenous.

There is an unburdening, an unshackling, a jouissance made possible as ‘we’ come together in a fight to the death against ‘them’. The mundane reality of having your living standards chipped away at month by month, instead gives way to an exciting battle in which you have a role to play. It gives license to destroy rather than be destroyed. In framing the ideas they are battling against as viral contaminants, which someone can be brainwashed by through the simple fact of an encounter, they license an epistemology in which their enjoyment cannot be checked by anyone. I’m looking forward to the book Erik Swyngedouw and Lucas Pohl are working on about Lacanian readings of the climate crisis, which I think will intersect interestingly with what Butler is arguing here.

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