“The new lords of the global village are not just Wall Street insiders or run-of-the-mill plutocrats; they are a disparate, distinctly more anarchic group of powerful forces.”
Just in time for the midterms, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have delivered an incredibly relevant new book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, that quite plainly lays out what is at stake in the coming election. We are living under a new form of authoritarianism that has already deeply weakened our democracy and threatens to push us over the cliff toward a dystopian future where only our new oligarchs will be able to survive the harsh social, economic, and environmental realities we face.
Klein and Taylor survey the landscape of contemporary analyses of authoritarianism and name the present system “End Times Fascism,” a unique strain of political disease that has flourished due to several factors that have emerged out of the circumstances of our current Gilded Age. What characterizes the malady that afflicts us? In sum, we are ruled by a nearly totally unaccountable elite. As they note:
At its core, end times fascism is a crisis of rampant impunity born of concentrated power and wealth. Far too much money, information technology, and weaponry have been allowed to concentrate into the hands of the few, and that unchecked power has deranged our elites, goading them to take risks that put our societies and countless species at risk.
And if the risks taken by contemporary elites seem to be crossing lines that other members of the traditional oligarchy were loath to trespass, that’s because they are. The new lords of the global village are not just Wall Street insiders or run-of-the-mill plutocrats; they are a disparate, distinctly more anarchic group of powerful forces. End times fascism is not the product of a coherent movement: “rather than a monolith, it is an alliance of very different groups, each one racing toward a different but related apocalyptic dream, sutured together in common cause . . . religious end timers, the tech end timers, and the ethno-nationalist end timers.”
Hence the ongoing barrage of assaults on everything from education, civil rights, and freedom of speech to environmental sustainability and democratic institutions of all kinds seems like an unfocused shotgun blast because it is coming from several different angles all at once. Rushing towards climate catastrophe, unchecked oligarchy, and patriarchal, white supremacist retrenchment as the AI onslaught undermines our sense of reality and ability to think critically is only possible because the chaos creates polycrises and a blitzkrieg of disruptions makes it hard for the average person to get a clear cognitive map of power.
And the resulting radical uncertainty unmoors people from their traditional bearings and allows the end times fascists to portray themselves as our saviors from the very threats that they have unleashed on the world. We might not survive them, but they don’t care. Their end game is not to save anything but themselves.
As Klein and Taylor argue:
[F]ascist movements claim to be defending powerful institutions—the nation, the market, the military, the family—from internal and external pollutants. In the logic of fascism, the task of defeating those threats and reimposing order, requires emergency measures, often destroying many of the very institutions fascists claim to be defending.
Enter Trump and company as they prepare to contest what is looking like a tsunami of Democratic voters this November. The huge margins they will likely lose by in most places have made their task harder, but this has not deterred them. After discovering that their initial attempts to interfere with the midterms would not bear fruit, the MAGA right has simply found new roads to the ruin of American democracy.
Seymour Hersch outlines their most likely next move on his Substack:
So here comes the GOP’s Plan B, which still depends on election deniers who have been voted into office in states with contested Senate seats that could decide the fate of Trump’s last two years in office.
I was told that the targets, in terms of putting election deniers to work, are now limited to five states where a few thousand votes could make the difference in the political makeup of the Senate: Ohio, Texas, Alaska, Iowa, and Kansas. The election counting machinery in each state is now in the control of elected Republican voting officials who are Trump supporters. In two other states, Georgia and North Carolina, Republican candidates are in trouble and Democratic candidates are comfortably ahead in polling.
“If the election is close,” one insider explained to me, “you would only have to disqualify as few as seven thousand voters” in primarily Democratic precincts “to change the outcome.” One thought now, I was told, is to call on election deniers in the toss-up states to find ways to use existing federal data, verified or not, to challenge thousands of votes in key Democratic precincts. (Trump said yesterday that he would not rule out invoking the Insurrection Act around the midterms, if he deems it necessary. Let us call that Plan C.)
Hence, it would not be wise to let the ugly polls for the GOP make us complacent or allow Trump’s increasingly pathetic public persona to lead us to underestimate the danger we face.
In sum, the crazier Trump seems, the more likely it is that he may just try to do the previously unthinkable and bring more troops back onto American streets. His Triumph of the Will style taxpayer funded TV ads are signaling how he will portray himself as a defender of American institutions as he blithely destroys them.
Trump is the very embodiment of an end times fascist. As Klein and Taylor argue, “We should believe our eyes. The most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.”
Vote and be vigilant, dear reader. The end times fascists will not go gently into their good night.
Indeed, even if we are successful in pushing back against the tide of authoritarianism in the midterms, so much more remains to be done. Klein and Taylor note that the task at hand will require us commit to the continuous work of occupying and defending the “paradise” of the “here” and “now.” Following Walter Benjamin, they call for a “messianism of the here and now” that is best embodied at present by the movement, with DSA at its center, that brought Zohran Mamdani to power in New York.
Mamdani’s campaign does not give us the perfect answer, but it does show us some of the rules of the road:
There is no cut-and-paste formula for fighting end times fascism; every front will take on the character and texture of its place. There are, however, some guiding principles that are beginning to emerge across locations, and the Mamdani campaign embodied many of them. Start from love of place; conjure a radically inclusive future where everyone can afford dignified lives: embrace common goals across difference; get outside and gather offline and in person; take on the powerful joyously, draw on history and don’t be afraid to stir the soul.
We need to build a world where we start to see “the word neighbor growing to expand to include thousands of people we have never met and who have yet to arrive.” More than anything else, Klein and Taylor suggest, we need to never lose sight of either what we are fighting against nor what the future we want should look like.
This article first appeared in The Jumping Off Place