I once said that the defining event of our lifetimes would be the resurgence of fascism. What do you see when you look around the globe today? Here’s what I see: fascism — of new, strange, and dystopian kinds — rising. To the very top. Of nation after nation.

I’m sorry. But we are going to have to think seriously about this, my friends — those few of us who still call ourselves civilized and decent people. It’s not enough, anymore, as Americans do, to bury our heads in the sand, cry “this isn’t happening!! No, no it’s not happening here!!”, and run away into the addictive dopamine rush of our Facebook friends and Instagram lives. None of that is real. The rise of global fascism — or something very much like it — is. China. India. American. Europe. Need I go on? There’s no corner of the globe now untouched by neofascist currents.

I think that when history writes the book of our age, it will see Islamic fascism as something like the formative template that then went on to spread around the globe. Muslims still don’t see what’s happened to their societies as fascism — isn’t there a warning in that? But let me explain.

A homeland of the pure, strong, and faithful. Cleansed of the weak and impure — who are dirty, filthy subhumans. A militant message broadcast by armies of demagogues. Jihadis who took up the call. And destabilized society after society. By bombing and shooting up places where civilized and decent values were being enacted: hospitals, schools, festivals. Minorities targeted, jailed, imprisoned, hunted, eliminated. New institutions built — justice systems, law enforcement agencies, whole new kinds of morality police. Society finally reshaped in the image of the perfect and the pure and the strong.

Doesn’t all that sound like fascism to you? It does to me. (Now, it’s true. There are a few bones to pick with describing what happened to the Islamic world as fascism. Old fascism abhors religion, whereas new fascism seems to be built upon it — so goes the American understanding. But old fascism didn’t abhor “religion” as much as we imagine. It was a deeply mystical exercise, steeped in its own mythology of sacred blood and divine violence and whatnot. The “Reich” was a reverent place — just not to Jesus Christ, to the old gods of tribe and fatherland. It’s our understanding of fascism that’s lacking here.)

And yet, if you reread that description of Islamic fascism — isn’t it, well, eerily reminiscent of what’s happened in America? Sure, the details might differ here and there. But the basic dynamics and ideas and mechanisms are precisely the same. A vision of racial purity and perfect piety and the pure and strong rising above the weak and impure. A nation cleansed of the subhumans, the “animals” and the “vermin”, who are responsible for its ills. The emergence of jihadis, who take up the cause, and shoot up places where civilized values are being happily lived. A society who begins to cower in fear. Institutions rebuilt. A nation reshaped in the image of the demagogues who are leading to to salvation.

Let’s shade in our picture a little bit. Islamic fascism we might say is something like theo-fascism. It is explicitly “religious” — and faith trumps nationhood. It isn’t mere “nationalism” — its goal is something like a new caliphate, in the extreme, or at least a federation of united Islamic states, proudly clean and faithful.

American fascism, on the other hand, is a clear derivative of centuries of supremacy, slavery, and segregation. That old America never went anywhere, it seems — it was just hibernating. And now it’s back with a vengeance, seeking to reinstate something very much like the America it used to be. So where Islamic fascism is theofascism, American fascism is something subtly different: I’d call it proto-fascism.

That means something like: ”fascism before fascism”, or “the original fascism.” I say that because the Nazis in fact both admired and studied America’s supremacist institutions — from Jim Crow to slavery to the elimination of personhood — and modeled their own new society after America’s lost one. So if America is reverting back to an older form of social organization, where whites lives above everyone else, where once they literally owned everyone else — who were the first fascists of all, the Nazis…or the Founding Fathers? I know that Americans won’t like to hear that. So go ahead and pick holes in it if you can. I have thought about it intently, and I have to concede, as much as I admire America, this logic appears to be immovable to me. Hence, I think what’s emerging in America is proto-fascism — the original variant, when settlers arrived on the shores of a Promised Land — and decided that it belonged only to them as masters and lords, hence everyone else already there was a subhuman, hence they needed slaves to till their fields.

But that’s not the only way I’d put what’s happened to America. America became the first rich country to collapse to the new wave of fascism. Why? Because it was the most capitalist country in the world. Capitalism implodes into fascism — inevitably. Why? Because capitalism concentrates capital among those who already own it, which starves labour of gains. That causes the middle class to crater, and inequality to spike. In their desperation and fear, the imploded middle begins to punch down, taking from the even more powerless what was promised to them — security, riches, stability, belonging, status. That sequence describes America perfectly, in hard empirical terms: the rich became ultra rich, but because they took more than 100% of the economy’s gains for decades, the middle class imploded. That fresh poverty produced a turn to a demagogue, who blamed everyone weaker for it — immmigrants, refugees, foreigners, etcetera. The Trump voter isn’t the poor black — he’s the declining white.

(Incidentally, all this should have been utterly predictable. But nobody in America’s establishment seemed capable of even remotely getting it.)

So the second half of America’s grim, weird collapse I’d describe as implosive fascism. Implosion of the middle, driven by economic stagnation, is a necessary feature of every fascist collapse — but it’s especially true in America. And when that met America’s history of supremacism and violence — bang! — a spectacular catastrophe was the result.

Yet America’s hardly the only country where the economics of stagnation and inequality have produced neo fascist current. Take China, for example. It’s put a million people into concentration camps, apparently. The lesson is this. China needs to exert harder and harder forms of social control because turning to capitalism has made people richer, sure — but it has also let the genie out of the bottle. Now the new middle class must have the things it was promised, or else it grows restless. And that’s the problem — as Chinese growth slows, the middle class is struggling — incomes aren’t keeping pace with costs of living. So China’s resorted to bizarre, dystopian (at least to us in the West) forms of social control — like “social credit systems.” Caught littering? Didn’t pay those bills? Sorry — you’re not allowed on public transport, in the hospital, etcetera.

I’d call all this techno-fascism. It’s easy to focus on the “techno” end of it. Wow! Look at all those clever and sophisticated and ingenious ways people are being controlled. What will they think of next? Social credit scores implanted on subdermal microchips?! The technology’s spectacular — but it misses the point. It is a way to control the surging tides of discontent that capitalism’s crises bring — resentment, anger, loneliness, despair, isolation, mistrust, hostility, greed, and so forth. All these things must be kept in check somehow — especially as the economy grinds to a halt, for exactly the same reason as America’s: the rich got too rich, leaving too little for the middle. Technology is the means, but the ends are neofascist — to control and restrain people, to make them virtuous, to cleanse away the weak and impure, the “liabilities” and “burdens.”

So. That’s many new kinds of fascism already. Theofascism, proto-fascism, technofascism, implosive fascism. There are more. In India, for example, a bombastic religious nationalism is rising, which has clear neofascist tendencies — purification, cleansing, strength, and so on. Why? In India’s case, it’s a combination of the above. Implosive capitalism — capitalism vastly widened inequality, instead of creating a society of shared prosperity. Just like China and America, middle are struggling to keep pace. But like America, India was long a caste society — we might call that proto-fascism. And that is certainly playing a role now. As capitalism fails, India is atavistically reverting to older forms of social order, in which everyone has an established place — versus instability and insecurity for everyone but the ultra rich. New India, they call it.

If you’re worried about the world — you should be. I wasn’t kidding, all those years ago, when I said the resurgence of fascism would be the defining event of our lifetimes.

Let me quickly explain why. These fascism don’t exist in a vacuum, my friends. What happens when America’s militant proto-fascism collides with China’s aspirational techno-fascism? What happens when India’s implosive theofascism collides with the Islamic world’s jihadi theofascism?

What tends to happen is violence. Of a spectacular kind. War, atrocity, barbarity. Genocide. The unthinkable. The world is turning fascist — and these fascisms are going to start colliding against each other soon. But there is only room for one master race, one Promised Land, one fatherland, one people who are the strongest and purest. Bang!

And yet we have real problems to solve. Climate change. Mass extinction. The very inequality and stagnation that are the proximate cause of all these resurgent fascisms, What about those? Who’ll do anything about those in a world of new fascist states — each vying to be the purest, strongest, most powerful?

Violent, ignorant, foolish men will do anything to rule. Even if all they end up ruling is the burned-out husk of a dead planet. Perhaps there’s a lesson in there, for the kind of future those of us who are still decent people need yet to build.

Umair

August 2019