Therein, though, is the hint as to what is actually behind the increasing authoritarian trends, whether those be state-led or populist. Because fascism is a reaction after all, but not a reaction against an aesthetic increase in social rights for select minorities. Instead, it is a reaction to an emergency.

Fascism—by which I also mean authoritarianism—is a way of managing civilizations during emergencies. Laws against dissent or political opposition during war time, for example, are justified as necessary because the very existence of the government is under threat from foreign powers (real, or as in the cast of the “wars against terrorism,” mostly manufactured and imaginary). During both World Wars, the United States (and all other major governments involved in the war) implemented increased surveillance, incarcerated or interned entire people groups, and harshly prosecuted property crimes and other offenses by the poor. Similarly in the last two decades, authoritarian power-grabs in response to “terrorism” such as the Patriot Act in the United States were used to prosecute environmentalists, war-dissenters, and civil-rights activists, a practice that continues up to the present day.

So if this increasing trend towards authoritarianism throughout the world is a reaction to an emergency, we must ask ourselves what that emergency is. Here we need to drop all pretenses that our Liberal Democracies are marching towards some utopian future of equality, or that there is any real progress being made to better our material conditions. Instead, we are forced to look at those very material conditions themselves and realize that they actually cannot get better.

Several hundred years ago, the way most humans had lived (relatively unchanged for thousands of years) shifted abruptly with the birth of factories and the exploitation of coal and oil. This led to explosions in population growth accompanied by massive deforestation, desertification, and most of all an exponential growth in carbon dioxide expelled into the air. All of this was seen as “progress,” the factory was the future, and because the earth on which we live possesses a deep resiliency, few of the effects this destruction caused became evident until last century.

No one should be surprised that the modern-nation state and the birth of surveillance and policing technologies also occurred at the exact same time. Such an explosion of economic and population growth required new strategies for maintaining power against the poor, especially since they were promised liberation through the illusions of democracy.

But here we are now, having reached the limits of earth’s resiliency and the resources used to build our civilizations—especially oil. There are no other easily-available energy sources to maintain—let alone expand—modern society, and anyways the time to have transitioned to more sustainable methods was several decades ago. So now every people group in the world sees the certainty of impending scarcity and in some cases genocide through starvation, flooding, drought, or war.

Every government of the world is now facing the undeniable question: how do we hold on to power in the face of catastrophic climate change? China has already found its answer, through increased surveillance and management of its people through a “social credit” system. In that system, every individual will eventually be tracked according to social, financial, legal, and commercial data and scored accordingly, with a low score (including political dissent or jay-walking too often) barring you from international flights and economic assistance.

While easy to dismiss from an orientalist standpoint as a dystopian project that cannot happen in the “enlightened West,” we must remember that such a system doesn’t arise out of nothing, nor is it meant merely to punish. The purpose of the social credit system in China is to manage resource availability: people who do not conform to the system lose access to economic goods and mobility itself, and access is granted only to those who do conform.

Here we can see that China is responding to the same emergency (dwindling resources) to which Emmanuel Macron was responding when he implemented his highly unpopular diesel tax. This tax was born not from a mere desire to punish people but to avoid an impending petroleum crisis by discouraging people from driving. While the Gillets Jaunes protesters in France have many justifiable reasons to criticize Macron’s introduction of the “environmental measure,” the problem remains that France both continues to pump out absurd amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, and also faces potential fuel shortages in the next few years. These are far greater crises than an increase in diesel costs.

Similar problems are occurring everywhere. Brexit, for all its racist and nationalist rhetoric, was an understandable response for a nation finding its economic power dwindling. So too the election of Jair Bolsonoro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the United States: previous centre-left governments had failed to address any of the actual impending economic crises and instead relied on political chicanery and heavy doses of optimism to opiate the masses. Germany is also facing a similar situation, with its centre-right leader Angela Merkel barely holding on to power against threats from several proto-fascist parties.

The situation we are in can perhaps best be seen with Trump’s proposed border-wall between the United States and Mexico. As awful as Trump is and as racist as the wall will be, it’s too easy to forget the actual logic behind the thing. The point of the wall isn’t to keep people out now, it’s to keep out the millions of people fleeing drought and starvation due to catastrophic climate change later. It is not about a racist present, but about a fascist future.

With this lens we can also look at other changes in the way the United States has been governed before the current president and see that there’s been no interruption at all, only a continuation. President Obama, for all his charming aesthetics of progress, continued and expanded military occupations in the Middle East while increasing the militarization of police within the United States. The answer as to why someone supposedly so committed to equality would do such a thing should now be obvious: the military actions were necessary to ensure the United States had continued access to oil reserves, and the militarization of police was to ensure the government could withstand internal challenges to its sovereignty…including by poor Black people.



In Our Past Is Our Future