There is no one uniting ideology between those who—across history and geography—see antifa practices as the best means to combat certain fascist iterations. I say “certain” because neo-Nazi, white supremacist groups, public figures, and, in our case, presidents are not the sum total of fascism. Even their total obliteration would not rid us of fascism.

They are simply a dangerous locus of what I want to call fascistic habit, formed of fascistic desire to dominate, oppress, and obliterate the nameable “other.” (I don’t use the word “habit” lightly; I mean no less than the modes by which we live). Their fascism is not a perversion of our society’s business-as-usual, but an outgrowth. I won’t talk of “neo-fascism” any more than I will talk of “neo-antifa.” Fascism never disappeared to be revived anew. It simply reiterates, sometimes with greater force. Antifa, as I see it, is one aspect of a broader abolitionist project, which would see all racist policing, prisons, and oppressive hierarchies abolished. As Bertolt Brecht wrote in 1935, “How can anyone tell the truth about Fascism, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth?”

Writing in 1933 Germany, Freudian acolyte Wilhelm Reich wrestled with the operations by which a society chooses fascism. He attempted to interrogate why a mass of people would choose their own oppression in an authoritarian system. He rejected narratives in which ignorant masses are duped or led into supporting a system they do not in fact want. Instead, he insisted that if we are to explain the rise of fascism, we must account for the fact that people, en masse, choose and desire fascism and we must understand that desire as genuine. Reich’s diagnosis—that the fascist subject is the product of societally enforced sexual repression, and can be thus treated with psychoanalysis—is biologically essentialist, over-general, and totally out of date. But his reckoning with fascistic desire is something sorely lacking in this moment of Trump-emboldened fascism and the battle against it.

Certain lines from Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism get regurgitated more than others in moments like this—moments in which a media cottage industry seems dedicated to defining fascism in order to prove that we are or are not faced with it. “Fascist mentality is the mentality of the subjugated ‘little man’ who craves authority and rebels against it at the same time”: that’s a popular one, and apt. So is the reflection that it is “not by accident that all fascist dictators stem from the milieu of the little reactionary man.” But I’m more interested in his observation that “there is today not a single individual who does not have the elements of fascist feeling and thinking in his structure.” And that “one cannot make the Fascist harmless if, according to the politics of the day, one looks for him only in the German or Italian, or the American or the Chinese; if one does not look for him in oneself; if one does not know the social institutions which hatch him every day.”

Reich’s insight is not restricted to Germany during Hitler’s rise. The problem of everyday fascisms, micro-fascisms with and by which we live, is real and complicates the fascist/anti-fascist dichotomy. There is a certain impossibility to “anti-fascist” as an identity. Philosophers and thinkers, particularly Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, have built on Reich’s idea of the perverted desire for fascism. They wrote that it is “too easy to be anti-fascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside of you.” In his famed introduction to their text Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault noted “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” For Deleuze and Guattari, fascism manifests in the various repressive and paranoid “assemblages” of society and politics.

So if we are all somehow possessed of fascism in this sense, how can we speak of anti-fascism, and how can we name and delineate the fascists of our political targeting? It is precisely through this recognition. The fascism Deleuze and Guattari are talking about is not some innate disease or pathology that we can’t shake, but rather a perversion of desire produced through forms of life under capitalism and modernity: practices of authoritarianism and domination and exploitation that form us, such that we can’t just “decide” our way out of them. But not everyone becomes a neo-Nazi. This too takes fascist practice, fascist habit; a nurturing and constant reaffirmation of that fascistic desire to oppress and live in an oppressive world. And, to be sure, the world provides that pernicious affirmation. Donald Trump is president after all.

How to break a habit? Sometimes, thought, therapy, reasoning. Sometimes. There are rare, rare stories of neo-Nazis who left the movement that way. But often habits are, if not broken, redirected by the introduction of serious consequences, such that the practices of the habit cannot be continued with the habitude that feeds and maintains them. When “serious consequences” are taken to mean brushes with criminal justice and the carceral system, that simply introduces state-sanctioned fascistic practices into the mix (not to mention the unlikelihood of the U.S. criminal justice system treating white supremacy as an enemy). This is the importance of anti-fascism also as practice and habit: if desiring fascism is not something that happens out of reason, we cannot break it with reason alone. So our interventions instead must make the entertainment and maintenance of fascist living intolerable. The desiring for fascism will not be thus undone: it is by its nature self-destructive. But at least the spaces for it to be nurtured and further normalized will be taken away.

And what of the fascisms in each of us who would be anti-fascist? “Kill the cop inside your head!” goes the anarchist dictum. Theorist John Protevi noted, following Deleuze and Guattari, “a thousand independent and self-appointed policemen do not make a Gestapo, though they may be a necessary condition for one.” How do we remove ourselves from being part of such a condition? We cannot simply be anti-fascist. We must practice and make better habits, better forms of life. “Anti-fascist” as gerund verb, not noun or adjective: a constant effort of anti-fascisting against the fascisms even we uphold. Working to create non-hierarchical ways of living, working to undo our own privileges and desires for power. The individualized and detached self, the over-codings of family unit normativity, the authoritarian tendency of careerism—all among paranoiac sites of micro-fascism in need of anti-fascist care. Again, easier said than done. But better than a faulty approach to anti-fascism that frames it as some pure position, when it is not. We act against ur-fascists in the knowledge that we need to act against ourselves too. The strategy is always to create consequences for living a fascist life and to seek anti-fascist departures.

But this effort, which has no obvious end, is stymied from the jump within a discourse that rejects anti-fascist consequences even be wrought on neo-Nazis.