What’s up y’all, today we’re dissecting that goof-ass Jacobin article about how liberals are apparently overreacting about the looming threat of fascism. Very cool thing for a socialist publication to publish!

Welcome to Fugue Plague, a weekly newsletter about politics, punk rock and imagining better possible worlds. Are Democratic pundits, and the liberal class more broadly, right to call out fascism in a returning Trump presidential candidacy? Or are they just a li’l delulu, having convinced themselves permanently that the end of the world is coming at the hands of Trump and the Heritage Foundation? Our intrepid, uh, writers at Jacobin, Daniel Bessner and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, are on the case! From atop their perch they proclaim: “Liberals’ Heated Fascism Rhetoric Sidesteps Self-Reflection!” But do they truly have the bird’s eye view of American (Neo-)Liberalism or should they just eat crow?

Before we get into it, it’s important to know that Bessner is a returning contributor to Jacobin; his publishing history there goes back to December 2016 and an article called “The Weimar Analogy,” where he argues: “Condemning fascism […] is not a productive progressive agenda,” calling instead for “viable coalitions, [commitment] to distributionist policies, and [addressing] the needs of the many.” As an associate professor at the University of Washington, and a non-resident fellow at the so-called “Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft,” minimizing attempts to describe Trump as a fascist has kind of been Bessner’s thing since the beginning. Steinmetz-Jenkins doesn’t skew too far off that beat either, but the last decade or so has mostly preoccupied him with other questions, like “Why did neoconservatives join forces with neoliberals?” and “Can Christian democracy save America from Trump?“

Of course, I am nothing but a grimy anarcho-syndicalist who once wrote for a market anarchist think tank, so, stones, glass houses, etc. Anyway, we’re not here to dig up these writers’ pasts; we’re here to dissect their currently-offered arguments and see if they hold up. So let’s do that!

Chasing Phantasms

As we all know and are all in agreement on, Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, and despite a clumsy attempt to consolidate and hold onto power, relinquished the office at the end of January 2021. He has spent the following three years coping and seething to an unimaginable degree, and has been planning his return to power from the get-go. This is where Bessner and Steinmetz-Jenkins – let’s call them “The Daniels” for ease of wording – begin: Trump won the GOP nomination, as we all pretty much figured he would, and now Democrats are returning to a strategy that they believe won them the 2022 midterms: screaming incessantly about how democracy is being threatened by Trumpism.

“Despite Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, this doom-and-gloom narrative, which frames democracy as perilously teetering on the verge of collapse, never really went away,” The Daniels write. “During the 2022 midterm electoral campaign, well before Trump’s return, President Joe Biden argued that the ‘extreme MAGA philosophy’ was ‘like semifascism,’ while the liberal media anxiously worried that a tsunami-like “Red Wave” would wash away the republic.”

When the Democrats only lost the House of Representatives by a handful of seats and not only held onto but grew their control of the Senate, that confirmed to some commentators that the Democratic Party strategy of continuing to play up the threat of rising fascism worked.

As The Daniels point out, Democratic analysts weren’t in consensus about this; they specifically cite Simon Rosenberg, who told Vox in late November 2022, “The failure that just took place is more grave than the polling error [in 2020] because there were a lot of really smart people who basically misled tens of millions of people through their political commentary in the final few weeks.”

From The Daniels’ point of view as channeled through Rosenberg, “this rhetoric might have had the ironic effect of suppressing voter turnout by demoralizing voters.”

So, okay. What’s the real problem with using this as an electoral strategy? Well, aside from burning out constituents who get sick of constantly hearing the world is ending despite their (or their party’s) best efforts, it’s hard to call the strategy a winning vision of a brighter future. It’s also not much of a method of addressing the real structural problems below the surface of our neoliberal world, according to Bessner and Steinmetz-Jenkins.

“Over the course of the twentieth century, the United States’ ruling class built an incredibly complex ecosystem of governmental and nongovernmental groups that effectively ensured ordinary Americans had very little say concerning several issue areas, including foreign policy and the macroeconomy,” they write. They speculate that this is the real reason why “a growing number of black, Latino, and Asian voters” have recently rejected the Democratic Party, and so far this is genuinely the weakest part of their claim, with their only source for this particular tidbit being a paywalled Financial Times report.

In doing just a bit of research, I was able to find two recent polls that, at least on their face, seem to agree with The Daniels’ argument here: a Gallup poll published in early February, and a Pew Research poll from a week or so ago. Both polls notice a shift in Latinx and Black voters going from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, but there’s very little analysis regarding why they’re making the switch. The Pew report, for example, explains that while demographics do appear to be shifting, part of this has to do with a net increase of voters in these demographic groups across the board and may not be that representative of a sea change. (The report goes on to say that another report diving into the actual motivations of voters in different demographics is due out in June.)

Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon writes, “the polls Burn-Murdoch and others are citing might be overstating how much voters of color support Republicans. Other surveys show Trump stuck at the normal Republican levels: about 10 percent among Black voters and well below 50 percent with Latinos. […] Polls with more conventional findings are less likely to go viral. That’s partly because people are more interested in what is new or unusual. Black voters overwhelmingly backing Democrats isn’t fresh.”

One source Bacon cited in his piece, Cornell Belcher, even likened this particular batch of poll data to the same “red wave” hysteria from 2022 cited by the Daniels. “No Republican over the last four decades, running for president, has garnered over 20% of the African-American vote,” Belcher said. “So the media would like us to believe that someone with a history of racism and discrimination and corruption is going to outperform every Republican for president over the last four decades with Black voters. This narrative either makes African-Americans out to be stupid, or shows how naïve the media is.”

What this all boils down to is, in order to even begin to entertain the Daniels’ claim that Black, Asian and Latinx voters are leaving the Democrats because of the party’s neoliberal reticence to challenge oligarchic systems, we have to agree that voters from these marginalized groups are in fact switching sides in the first place. And that doesn’t really seem to be that settled of a conclusion at all.

But anyway: back to the actual point of the article, which is that liberals spend too much time bleating about the boogeyman of fascism, to the extent where they ignore genuine problems in American society and even glaring issues in their own party. At this point, about halfway through the article, it might be prudent to start wondering if the Daniels have begun making headway on driving that point home. To be honest? I’m not seeing it. So far it’s just been, “Democrats are returning to a strategy that might have worked for them in the last election but probably not as well as they thought, and also we fundamentally disagree with everyone who associates Donald Trump and his supporters with fascism. Also, tangentially, some people might be leaving the Democratic Party; we think it’s because they definitely all have applied a systemic analysis to the American state and have decided nihilistically to become Republicans in the face of the coming apocalypse which we don’t believe is going to happen.” Which is fine, I guess, as an opinion to hold, but maybe less fine if you’re trying to convince other people of that opinion.

Danse Apocalyptic

Hopefully, the second half of this 1500-word article has the discursive red meat I’ve been craving. I genuinely hope we’ll be able to prove once and for all that liberals are lost in a fog of their own creation, seeing fascists among windmills, and crying wolf to their own great shame and embarrassment!

The Daniels instead start this second half of the piece by comparing “liberal ‘anti-fascists’” to the Islamophobic “New Atheists” of the first decade of the 21st century and claiming that everyone “From Biden to the historian Timothy Snyder to the talking head Rachel Maddow […] have repeatedly affirmed that the American body politic contains a fascist contaminant that needs to be identified and expelled.” The Daniels plaintively, rhetorically, ask: “How does diagnosing ‘fascism,’ which implicitly categorizes millions of Americans as a group to be expunged rather than won over, help us reform our undemocratic political system and attenuate economic inequality, racism, and gender and sexual discrimination? Simply put, it doesn’t.”

It’s at this point that I want to take a trip back to the Spring 2020 issue of Dissent Magazine, a very striking deep maroon-colored cover featuring a posterized Ronald Reagan shaking hands with Donald Trump while holding a “Make America Great Again” hat bearing the title, “Know Your Enemy.” Inside this issue of Dissent are two appearances by Steinmetz-Jenkins: he is the author of a piece titled “The Nationalist Roots of White Evangelical Politics,” and he is an interview subject in another feature, written by Matthew Sitman, titled: “Why We Left the Right.” It’s this latter piece I want to turn to, because I think it’s vital context towards dissecting the piece we’re all here for. Here’s his opening section from the piece:

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: I was at UC–Berkeley the night Trump was elected. I’ll never forget the pandemonium that broke out on campus. I had two or three roommates that entered a state of shock. I was scheduled to give a talk the next day, and it was canceled. If I recall correctly, the counseling centers at Berkeley were overbooked for weeks.

I grew up in the panhandle of Florida, with a lot of people who would go on to be Trump supporters. I was raised in a charismatic Pentecostal context. Everyone in my family voted for Trump, including my mom, who married a black man. (My father is black, my mother is white.) So backing Trump wasn’t just about race. The church that I went to was nondenominational and multi-ethnic—like many charismatic churches since the 1970s. In fact, there were a remarkable number of interracial marriages that came out of this movement.

All of this put me in a strange position. My friends at Berkeley were terrified. Books from people like Timothy Snyder were warning about a return of fascism. But the people I grew up with in the panhandle still seemed very nice to me. I had long ago rejected their politics, but I never thought of them in the terms that centrists or liberals now did. I had to do some soul-searching about how I was raised and whether I should have seen something like this coming. And I suppose it shouldn’t have been that surprising. I take Sarah’s point about the importance of white nationalism, but I also think about people like my Mom, who just voted for Trump because she’s pro-life, and she’s not going to compromise on that.

I was being told by many of my academic colleagues that people I love and cared about a lot were racists, and I knew that not all of them were. And I also knew that since the financial crisis, a lot of the churches in the panhandle had shut down.

My identity as someone on the left became much more refined. I already knew what conservatives stood for, and I had left that world. But Trump’s election made me feel that there was a real disconnect between mainstream liberalism and what’s going on in wide swathes of the country. And that disconnect has been a crucial part of the emergence of a real left in this country.

The specific line I want to draw attention to out of all this is as follows: “My friends at Berkeley were terrified. Books from people like Timothy Snyder were warning about a return of fascism. But the people I grew up with in the panhandle still seemed very nice to me.” The first impulse here might be to sneer at the “Leopards-Eating-Faces Party” aspect of this perspective, but I want to get away from that for a second. This is a remarkably very conservative (little-c) way of viewing the world, and it’s a perspective I can at least empathize with, growing up through my teens in Oklahoma among people who had been raised since birth in this very mindset. Nobody wants to think of their family, friends and neighbors as being part of an aspiring dictator’s supporters, just like nobody likes to think their favorite uncle who is a cop could be included under “ACAB,” and to some degree you kind of have to view anyone who just immediately lumps everyone into one monolithic ideological chunk with suspicion. Is the person I giddily “discovered” anarchism and communism with in high school, who is now a full-blown Christian Libertarian, now my enemy? I mean, I’m reluctant to say yes or no. I lean towards no. But I’m no longer around that person all the same.

Steinmetz-Jenkins is not, I don’t think, an outlier in the political world, someone who has rubber-banded from conservatism into some form of leftism. In the piece I pulled from, he is textually surrounded by three other people who share broad strokes of that experience. I think it’s positive that he and other ex-conservatives shared their stories. But I also think you don’t fully unlearn dominant ideologies you were a part of which formed so much of your identity before you made a break for it.

I think Steinmetz-Jenkins’s conservatism (little-c) contributes to his squeamishness around antifascism, liberal or otherwise, because to accept that fascism as it has manifested in modern society actually exists – in violent, messy, imprecise, often deeply and counterintuitively stupid ways – means to accept that we can’t simply reason our way to a socioeconomic leftist revolution, that a better world is not one really badass policy white paper away.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

In a rather fascinating move, the Daniels label liberal antifascism as a “millenarian” obsession, implicitly connecting people who think Donald Trump is a wannabe dictator and probably shouldn’t have another opportunity to become one to both Evangelical Christianity and other doomsday cults like Aum Shinrikyo. They write, “Ironically, secular liberals seem to have learned a great deal from the evangelicals; just as evangelicals discern in American ungodliness the telltale signs of the end times and the dreaded coming of the Antichrist, many liberals sense all around them sinister forces working to pave the way for a Trump dictatorship.” To the Daniels, this insistence on dividing opposing factions into “children of light” and “children of darkness” doesn’t actually result in meaningful resistance, especially considering authoritarian leaders “continue to win election after election.”

They end the piece by staking the claim that millenarian apocalypticism of this sort produces a calming effect in liberal “anti-fascists,” because they get to imagine an enemy that, once defeated, will give way to (a return to) normalcy. The looming threat of a world in chains serves as an ameliorating opiate that also has the effect of preventing liberals from envisioning better worlds at all. They write, “seeing fascism everywhere prevents those who rightly despise Trump’s reactionary social and economic positions from crafting the bold alternatives we need for the new era that we’re so clearly entering. The time for stern warnings about our American (semi, proto, or fascoid) Adolf Hitler has long passed. If we really want to improve our democracy, we must lay the fascism debate to rest and turn to face our uncertain future.”

And that… that’s it. 1500 words where it feels like the authors spent the whole word count kind of halfheartedly thumbing their nose at the flimsy conception of liberal “anti-fascists” they created to knock down: some kind of amalgam of “Vote Blue No Matter Who” party operatives and the kind of hysterical #resistance poster who spends all day on Twitter reposting Mueller She Wrote bullshit. And all we get at the end is “c’mon you guys stop talking about fascism and read Jacobin.” No genuine conclusion, no real point being proven.

I’m disappointed, because this article is way too mediocre for it to have elicited the outraged reactions I saw on Bluesky on Friday night. All it really demonstrates is that two American academics have a myopic view of the social dynamics between various groups on the left and right – and like, what else is new?

To The Root

So at the end of the day we have an article by a couple of nominally-socialist technocrats arguing rather unconvincingly that liberals are obsessed with playing with the phantom of fascism because it’s more fun, I guess, than actually doing things to help people. Does that mean liberals get a pass? Absolutely not. The “Vote Blue No Matter Who” set and the “#Resistance” set of hyper-annoying online liberal are often one and the same, and my biggest problem with them is that voting is quite literally all they’ve got. Voting isn’t just the first thing on their list; it’s the whole fucking list. Their entire goddamn range of ethical considerations and outlook on the world begins and ends in the ballot box, and that genuinely sucks!

But the Vote Or Die crowd has been like this since I was young, and their strategy today isn’t really all that different from the strategy of Kerry supporters in 2004, or Obama supporters in 2012. (Especially check out their reactions to learning people voted for Ralph Nader in ’04, or Gary Johnson or Jill Stein in ’12.) Whether they cynically believe that a marginal display of antifascism will get them the necessary votes for victory, or their belief that Trump is a fascist wannabe tryhard and must be stopped is genuine, they’ve never, ever taken that analysis further than getting out the vote.

What I’m more disappointed in (but again, not terribly surprised by) is the fact that The Daniels have chosen to surreptitiously go after antifascism writ large with this piece. They make a radical tradition dating back to the 1930s out to be the delusional fantasy of a liberal elite desperate for any kind of distraction to keep The People from discovering the specific neoliberal trappings of the modern state (or whatever). They believe that by choosing to engage in antifascist research or activism, we condemn a large portion of the population to, at best, exclusion from modern society. This presupposes that antifascists writ large believe two things: that all Republicans, or all Trump supporters, are active fascists or members of fascist organizations; and that Donald Trump himself is the source of the far right insurgency. Neither presupposition is true. Instead, antifascists take a multifaceted approach to their analysis that allows them to not only contend with the immediate threat of fascism in front of them, but also keep their eyes on the larger structures of power and domination that incubated that threat to begin with: the Three-Way Fight.

I’m by no means a scholar of antifascism but I wanted to wrap this unnecessarily long newsletter up with some further reading, especially if you’re interested in understanding what antifascism genuinely is (and isn’t):

Seven Theses on the Three-Way Fight, by Devin Zane Shaw. Maybe the most succinct explanation of the antifascist viewpoint out there, as well as a good discussion-starter on the limits of “everyday antifascism” and the uneasy truce between militant antifascists and so-called liberal antifascists. The seven theses are, in short:

• Fascism is a social movement involving a relatively autonomous and insurgent (potentially) mass base, driven by an authoritarian vision of collective rebirth, that challenges bourgeois institutional and cultural power, while re-entrenching economic and social hierarchies.
• Fascist ideology and organizing develops within a broader far-right ecological niche.
• Militant antifascism is involved in a three-way fight against insurgent far-right movements and bourgeois democracy (or, in ideological terms, liberalism).
• The particularity of the three-way fight is dependent on concrete social relations. Far-right and fascist groups draw on and respond differently to different social contexts. For example, during the interwar period, fascist movements drew from the imperialist aspirations of European nationalisms. In North America, far-right movements emerge in relation to broader ideological and material forms of settler-colonialism (which includes—meaning that capital accumulation is imbricated in—elements of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, ableism, and Indigenous dispossession).
• Far-right movements are system-loyal when they perceive that the entitlements of white supremacy can be advanced within bourgeois or democratic institutions and they become insurgent when they perceive that these entitlements cannot.
• A revolutionary horizon is a necessary component to antifascist organizing; that is, there is no meaningful way in which fascism can be permanently defeated without overthrowing the conditions which give rise to it: capitalism and white supremacy, and in North America, settler-colonialism.
• Militant antifascism must uphold the diversity of tactics.

Three-Way Fight: Revolutionary Anti-Fascism and Armed Self-Defense, By J. Clark. Another defining piece that primarily interrogates the need to confront an increasingly dynamic and shifting right-wing movement.

Responding to Fascist Organizing, by William Gillis. Written five days after J20 2017 and the punch memed ’round the world, this article spells out in no uncertain terms why it is important to forcefully respond to fascists that pop up in your vicinity: “Regardless of whether or not you agree with it or consider it ethical, people punch fascists because it frequently works.” From my old haunt.

Against the Fascist Creep, by Alexander Reid Ross. A great book that details how fascists worm their way into unexpected places or cause so-called “red-brown alliances” to form.

Endnotes

While I wrote this I primarily listened to Fall of Efrafa, a band whose big thing is writing green-anarchist and anti-war hardcore/post-rock/epic crust based on Watership Down.

But given the nature of this particular essay I couldn’t help it and I indulged in a little antifascist singing-along. Here’s the YouTube playlist.

See y’all next week with a hopefully much shorter post!