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Chapter 3

The Politics of Neoliberal Fascism

Every age has its own fascism.

— Primo Levi

Introduction

The nightmares that have shaped the past and await return slightly just below the surface of American society are poised to wreak havoc on us again. America has reached a distinctive crossroads in which the principles and practices of a fascist past and neoliberal present have merged to produce what Philip Roth once called “the terror of the unforeseen.” Since the 1970s, American society has lived with the curse of neoliberalism, or what can be called the latest and most extreme stage of predatory capitalism. As part of a broader comprehensive design, neoliberalism’s overriding goal is to consolidate power in the hands of the financial elite. As a mode of rationality, it functions pedagogically in multiple cultural sites to ensure that no alternatives to its mode of governance can be either imagined or constructed. Central to its philosophy is the assumption that the market drives not just the economy but all of social life. It construes profit-making as the essence of democracy and consuming as the only operable form of agency. It redefines identities, desires, and values through a market logic that privileges self-interest and unchecked individualism. Under neoliberalism, life-draining and unending competition is a central concept for defining human freedom.

As an economic policy, neoliberalism creates an all-encompassing market guided by the principles of privatization, deregulation, commodification, and the free flow of capital. Advancing these agendas, it weakens unions, radically downsizes the welfare state, and wages an assault on public services such as education, libraries, parks, energy, water, prisons, and public transportation. As the state is hollowed out, big corporations take on the functions of government, imposing severe austerity measures, redistributing wealth upward to the rich and powerful, and reinforcing a notion of society as one of winners and losers.124 Put simply, neoliberalism gives free rein to finance capital and seeks to liberate the market from any restraints imposed by the state. At present, governments exist primarily to maximize the profits, resources, and the power of the wealthy. As a political project, neoliberalism empties politics of any substance and denounces any viable notion of the social contract. This is evident as a market society replaces a market economy and the language of politics is replaced by market-based discourses and values. Moreover, neoliberalism produces widespread misery and suffering as it weakens any vestige of democracy that interferes with its vision of a self-regulating market. In a winner-take-all society, the burden of merely surviving prevents many people from sharing in the power to govern.

Theoretically, neoliberalism is often associated with the work of Friedrich August von Hayek and the Mont Pelerin Society, Milton Friedman, and the Chicago School of Economics, and most infamously with the politics of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, President Ronald Reagan in the United States, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in England. Politically, it is supported by various right-wing think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and by billionaires such as the Koch Brothers. The legacy of neoliberalism cannot be separated from its attempt to impose a new narrative in which the logic of the market is more important than the ideals that define a substantive democracy. Moreover, any efforts to “create a more equal society are [considered] both counterproductive and morally corrosive.”125 In this narrative, capital is the subject of history, everything is for sale, the rich get what they deserve, and those who fail to accumulate wealth and power are dismissed as losers, making it easier to refigure massive inequality as virtuous and responsibility as an individual choice. Neoliberalism not only takes aim at the welfare state, social provisions, and public goods, it also cancels out the future. It has produced with a kind of fraudulent weight an all-consuming narrative that treats human misery as normal and its fictional portrayals of those it considers disposable as the apogee of common sense.

Neoliberalism’s hatred of democracy, the common good, and the social contract has unleashed generic elements of a fascist past in which white supremacy, ultra-nationalism, and rabid misogyny come together in a toxic mix of militarism, state violence, and a politics of disposability. Modes of fascist expression adapt variously to different political historical contexts assuring racial apartheid-like forms in the postbellum United States and overt encampments and extermination in Nazi Germany. Fascism — with its unquestioning belief in obedience to a powerful cult figure, violence as a form of political purification, hatred as an act of patriotism, racial and ethnic cleansing, and the superiority of a select ethnic or national group — has resurfaced in the United States. In this mix of economic barbarism, political nihilism, racial purity, free market orthodoxy, and ethical somnambulance, a distinctive economic-political formation has been produced that I term neoliberal fascism.

Neoliberalism as the New Fascism

The war against liberal democracy has become a global phenomenon. Authoritarian regimes have spread from Turkey, Poland, Hungary,

and India to the United States and a number of other countries.126 Right-wing populist movements are on the march spewing forth a poisonous mix of ultra-nationalism, white supremacy, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. The language of national decline, humiliation, and demonization fuels dangerous proposals and policies aimed at racial purification and social sorting while hyping a masculinization of agency and a militarism reminiscent of past dictatorships. Under current circumstances, the forces that have produced the histories of mass violence, torture, genocide, and fascism have not been left behind. Consequently, it has been more difficult to argue that the legacy of fascism has nothing to teach us regarding how “the question of fascism and power clearly belongs to the present.”127

Fascism has multiple histories, most connected either to failed democracies in Italy and Germany in the 1930s or to the overthrow of democratic governments by the military, as in Argentina and Chile in the 1970s. Moreover, the history between fascism and populism involves a complex mix of relations over time.128 What is distinctive about this millennial fascism is that its history of “a violent totalitarian order that led to radical forms of political violence and genocide” has been softened by attempts to recalibrate its postwar legacy to a liberal democratic register.129 For instance, in Hungary, Turkey, and Poland — and in a number of other emerging fascist states — the term “illiberal democracy” is used as code to allegedly replace a “supposedly outmoded form of liberal democracy.”130 In actuality, the term is used to justify a form of populist authoritarianism whose goal is to attack the very foundations of democracy. These fascist underpinnings are also expanding in the United States. In Trump’s bombastic playbook, the notion of “the people” has become a rhetorical tool to legitimate a right-wing mass movement in support of a return to the good old days of American Apartheid.131 Trump’s right-wing populism is born of and breeds “a culture convulsed of hatred and rancor.”132 It is a worldview organized for repulsion willing to intellectually rationalize the murder of a journalist by Saudi Arabia, the killing of children in Yemen, and the forcible separation of migrant families at the southern border.

Democracy is the scourge of neoliberalism

and its ultimate humiliation

As the ideas, values, and institutions crucial to a democracy have withered under a savage neoliberalism, which has been 50 years in the making, fascistic notions of racial superiority, social cleansing, apocalyptic populism, hyper-militarism, and ultra-nationalism have gained in intensity, moving from the repressed recesses of US history to the centers of state and corporate power.133 Decades of mass inequality, wage slavery, the collapse of the manufacturing sector, tax giveaways to the financial elite, and savage austerity policies that drove a frontal attack on the welfare state have further strengthened fascistic discourses and redirected populist anger against vulnerable populations and undocumented immigrants, Muslims, the racially oppressed, women, LBGTQ+ people, public servants, critical intellectuals, and workers. Not only has neoliberalism undermined the basic elements of democracy by escalating the mutually reinforcing dynamics of economic inequality and political inequality — accentuating the downhill spiral of social and economic mobility — it has also created conditions that make fascist principles more attractive.

Under these accelerated circumstances, neoliberalism and fascism conjoin and advance in a comfortable and mutually compatible movement that connects the worse excesses of capitalism with authoritarian “strong man” ideals — the veneration of war; a hatred of reason and truth; a celebration of ultra-nationalism and racial purity; the suppression of freedom and dissent; a culture which promotes lies, spectacles, scapegoating the other, a discourse of deterioration, and brutal violence, ultimately erupting in state violence in heterogeneous forms. In the Trump administration, neoliberalism is on steroids and represents a realignment — a convergence of the worse dimensions and excesses of gangster capitalism with the fascist ideals of white nationalism and racial supremacy associated with the horrors of the past.134

Neoliberal structural transformation has both undermined and refigured “the principles, practices, cultures, subjects, and institution of democracy understood as rule by the people.”135 Since the early seventies, the neoliberal project has mutated into a revolt against human rights and democracy, and created a powerful narrative that refigures freedom and authority so as to legitimate and produce massive inequities in wealth and power.136 Its practices of offshoring, restructuring everything according to the dictates of profit margins, slashing progressive taxation, eliminating corporate regulations, unchecked privatization, and the ongoing commercializing of all social interactions “inflicts alienating misery” on a polity vulnerable to fascist ideals, rhetoric, and politically extremist movements.137

Furthermore, the merging of neoliberalism and fascism has accelerated as civic culture is eroded, notions of shared citizenship and responsibility disappear, and reason and informed judgment are replaced by the forces of civic illiteracy. State sanctioned attacks on the truth, facts, and scientific reason in Trump’s America are camouflaged as one might expect of the first reality TV president — by a corporate-

controlled culture of vulgarity that merges celebrity culture with a non-stop spectacle of violence. As language and politics are emptied of any substantive meaning, an authoritarian populism is emboldened and fills the airways and the streets with sonic blasts of racism, anti-

Semitism, and violence. The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg rightly observes that Trump makes it difficult to hold onto any sense of what is normal given his relentless attempts to upend the rule of law, justice, ethics, and democracy itself. She writes:

The country has changed in the past year, and many of us have grown numb after unrelenting shocks. What now passes for ordinary would have once been inconceivable. The government is under the control of an erratic racist who engages in nuclear brinkmanship on Twitter … He publicly pressures the Justice Department to investigate his political opponents. He’s called for reporters to be jailed, and his administration demanded that a sportscaster who criticized him be fired. Official government statements promote his hotels. You can’t protest it all; you’d never do anything else. After the election, many liberals pledged not to “normalize” Trump. But one lesson of this year is that we don’t get to decide what normal looks like.138

There is more at work here than the kind of crass entertainment that mimics celebrity culture. As Pankaj Mishra argues we live in a world in which there is a “rout of such basic human emotions as empathy, compassion, and pity.”139 This is a world in which “the puzzle of our age is how this essential foundation of civic life went missing from our public conversation.”140 Part of that puzzle undermining civic culture and its institutions can be found in an unprecedented corporate takeover over of the US government and the reemergence of elements of totalitarianism in new forms. At stake here is the power of an authoritarian ideology that fuels a hyperactive exploitative economic order, apocalyptic nationalism, and feral appeals to racial cleansing that produce what Paul Street has called the nightmare of capitalism.141

Neoliberalism strips democracy of any substance by promoting an irrational belief in the ability of the market to solve all social problems and shape all aspects of society. This shift from a market economy to a market-driven society has been accompanied by a savage attack on equality, the social contract, and social provisions as wages have been gutted, pensions destroyed, health care put out of reach for millions, job security undermined, and access to crucial public goods such as public and higher education considerably lessened for the lower and middle classes.

In the current historical moment, neoliberalism represents more than a form of hyper capitalism, it also denotes the death of democracy if not politics itself. Defining all aspects of society in economic terms, finance and corporate capital defines all behavior through the lens of neoliberal reason. One consequence is that the most fundamental elements of democracy — including the vocabularies that define it, the spaces of deliberation that make it imaginable, and the formative cultures that create the informed citizens that make it possible — are under siege. Anis Shivani’s articulation of the threat neoliberalism poses to democracy is worth quoting at length:

Neoliberalism believes that markets are self-sufficient unto themselves, that they do not need regulation, and that they are the best guarantors of human welfare. Everything that promotes the market, i.e., privatization, deregulation, mobility of finance and capital, abandonment of government-

provided social welfare, and the reconception of human beings as human capital, needs to be encouraged, while everything that supposedly diminishes the market, i.e., government services, regulation, restrictions on finance and capital, and conceptualization of human beings in transcendent terms, is to be discouraged.142

What is particularly distinctive about the conjuncture of neoliberalism and fascism is how the full-fledged liberation of capital now merges with an out-and-out attack on the racially oppressed and vulnerable populations considered disposable. Not only do the oppressive political, economic, and financial structures of casino capitalism bear down on people’s lives, but there is also a frontal attack on the shared understandings and beliefs that hold a people together. One crucial and distinctive place where neoliberalism and fascism converge is in the undermining of social bonds and moral boundaries. Displacement, disintegration, atomization, social isolation, and deracination have a long history in the United States, which has been aggressively exploited and intensified by Trump, taking on a distinctive right-wing 21st century register. More is revealed here than the heavy neoliberal toll of social abandonment. There is also, under the incessant pedagogical propaganda of right-wing and corporate-controlled media, a culture that has become cruel and cultivates an appetite for maliciousness that undermines the capacity for empathy, making people willing participants in their violent exclusion.

While there is much talk about the influence of Trumpism, there are few analyses that examine its culture of cruelty and politics of disposability. Such cultures reach back to the founding of the United States as a settler-colonial society. How else does one explain a long line of state-endorsed atrocities — the genocide waged against Native Americans in order to take their land, enslavement and breeding of black people for profit and labor, and the passage of the Second Amendment to arm and enforce white supremacy over those populations? The legacies of those horrific roots of US history are coded into Trumpist slogans, as I mentioned previously about “making America great again,” and egregiously defended through appeals to American exceptionalism.

More recent instances indicative of the rising culture of bigoted cruelty and mechanisms of erasure in US politics include the racially motivated drug wars, policies that shifted people from welfare to workfare without offering training programs or childcare, and morally indefensible tax reforms that will “require huge budget cuts in safety net programs for vulnerable children and adults.”143 As Marian Wright Edelman points out, such actions are particularly alarming and cruel at a time when “millions of America’s children today are suffering from hunger, homelessness, and hopelessness. Nearly 13.2 million children are poor — almost one in five. About 70 percent of them are children of color who will be a majority of our children by 2020. More than 1.2 million are homeless. About 14.8 million children struggle against hunger in food insecure households.”144

Trump is both a symptom and enabler of this culture, one that permits him to delight in taunting black athletes, embrace the ideology of white nationalism, and mocking anyone who disagrees with him. This is the face of a kind of Wilhelm Reichian psycho-politics with its mix of violence, repression, theatrics, incoherency, and spectacularized ignorance. Trump makes clear that the dream of the Confederacy is still with us, that moral panics thrive within a culture of rancid racism: “a background of obscene inequalities, progressive deregulation of labor markets, and a massive expansion in the ranks of the precariat.”145 All of this suggests that fascism is more than faint memory unrelated to the present moment in American history.

Irish journalist, Fintan O’Toole, warns that fascism unravels the ethical imagination through a process in which individuals eventually “learn to think the unthinkable,” — followed, he writes, “by a crucial next step, usually the trickiest of all.” He writes:

You have to undermine moral boundaries, inure people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They have to be given the taste for savagery. Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group. This allows the members of that group to be dehumanized. Once that has been achieved, you can gradually up the ante, working through the stages from breaking windows to extermination.146

What is often labeled as an economic crisis in American society is also a crisis of morality, of sociality, and of community. Since the 1970s, increasingly unregulated capitalism has hardened into a form of market fundamentalism that has accelerated the hollowing out of democracy through its capacity to reshape the commanding institutions of American society, making it vulnerable to the fascist solutions proposed by Trump. As an integrated system of structures, ideologies, and values, neoliberalism economizes every aspect of life, separates economic activity from social costs, and depoliticizes the public through corporate-controlled disimagination machines that trade in post-truth narratives, enshrine the spectacle of violence, debase language, and distort history. Neoliberalism now wages a battle against any viable notion of the social, solidarity, the collective imagination, the public good, and the institutions that support them. Wendy Brown rightly insists that democracy comes in many forms and does not offer any political guarantees, but without it, there is no acceptable future. She writes:

Without it, however, we lose the language and frame by which we are accountable to the present and entitled to make our own future, the language and frame with which we might contest the forces otherwise claiming that future.147

The Crisis of Reason and Fantasies of Freedom

As more and more power is concentrated in the hands of a corporate and financial elite, freedom is defined exclusively in market terms; inequality is cast as a virtue, and the logic of privatization heaps contempt upon civic compassion and the welfare state. The fatal after-

effect is that neoliberalism has emerged as the new face of fascism.148 With the 50 year advance of neoliberalism, freedom has become its opposite, a parody of its true meaning. Moreover, democracy — once the arc of civic freedom — now becomes its enemy since democratic governance no longer takes priority over the unchecked workings of the market. Neoliberalism undermines both social ties and the public good and, in doing so, weakens the idea of shared responsibilities and moral obligations. As Zygmunt Bauman argues, “ethical tranquillization” is now normalized under the assumption that freedom is limited to the right to only advance one’s own interests and the interests of the markets.149 Freedom in the neoliberal playbook disavows any notion of responsibility outside of the responsibility to oneself.

As Wendy Brown makes clear, democracy is now viewed as the enemy of markets and “politics is cast as the enemy to freedom, to order, and to progress.”150 Politics now becomes a mix of regressive notions of freedom and authority whose purpose is to protect market-driven principles and practices. What disappears in this all-encompassing reach of capital is the notion of civic freedom, which is replaced by securitization organized to protect the lawless workings of the profit motive and the savagery of neoliberal austerity policies. Moreover, as freedom becomes privatized, it feeds a lack of interest in politics and breeds moral indifference. Democratic passions are directed towards private pleasures, the demands of citizenship are undermined, and the public sphere withers as self-interest becomes one of the primary organizing principle of society. Under neoliberalism, the spheres of intimacy and interpersonal relations begin to disappear and are replaced by an ideological and economic system that constructs individuals as objects of capital within a system of harsh competitive relations and commercial exchange. As it becomes more difficult for people to think critically, the market provides them with a consumerist model that both infantilizes and depoliticizes people. As the terrain of politics, agency, and social relations loses its moral bearings, the passions of a fascist past are unleashed and society increasingly begins to resemble a war culture, blood sport and form of cage fighting.

In this instance, the oppressed are not only cheated out of history, they are led to believe that under neoliberal fascism there are no alternatives and that the future can only imitate the present. Not only does this position suppress any sense of responsibility and resistance, it produces what Timothy Snyder calls “a kind of sleepwalking, and has to end with a crash.”151 The latter is reinforced by a government that believes that the truth is dangerous and that reality begins with a tweet that signals both the legitimation of endless lies and forms of power that infantilize and depoliticize because they leave no room for standards of language capable of holding power accountable. Even worse, Trump’s war on language and truth does more than limit freedom to competing fictions, it also erases the distinction between moral depravity and justice, good and evil. As I have said elsewhere, “Trump’s Ministry of Fake News works incessantly to set limits on what is thinkable, claiming that reason, evidence, consistency, and logic no longer serve the truth because the latter are crooked ideological devices used by enemies of the state. ‘Thought crimes’ are now labeled as ‘fake news.’”152

Timothy Snyder is right in arguing that “to abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.”153 More startling is the assumption that in an age of deep divisions, exploitation, and precarity what matters is not only whether something is true or false but also the willingness of people to identify with the seductive lure of a consistent fascist narrative in which people willingly suspend “their capacity for distinguishing between the truth and falsehood, between reality and fiction.”154 Hannah Arendt rightly argued that “what was new and dangerous to the American republic was not lying, but a situation in which lies had become indistinguishable from the truth.”155 Needless to say, there is more at stake here than the creation and normalization of a culture of lying and what Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord and others identified as the theatricalization of politics, there is also the threat to democracy itself.