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The Economic Anxiety Explanation of Fascism Is Wrong, and Worse, Fatalist
🕑 Added 2023-10-11 12:00:06 +0000 UTCImage: Jacob Lawrence, The Legend of John Brown (1941/1977), no. 6: “John Brown formed an organization among the colored people of the Adirondack woods to resist the capture of any fugitive slave” [source]
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Fascism is caused by economic anxiety.
That’s not true. Study after study has shown that Trump’s voters were not particularly poor, but were very racist. Similarly, KKK members of the 20s were better educated and more likely to have professional jobs than most Americans—not really a surprise since the Klan by its nature excluded Black people, immigrants and other minorities who formed (and still form) the bulk of America’s poorest people. The exact class makeup of the Nazis is still disputed, but we do know that working class parties were among the fiercest opponents of fascism.
There just is little to no evidence that economic hardship leads to fascism. But a certain stripe of would-be leftist commentator can’t seem to let the thesis go. Chris Hedges waded into the familiar bullshit in a post last weekend, touching on the usual tired talking points (Democrats are responsible for everything—drink!)
The parting gift, I expect, of the bankrupt liberalism of the Democratic Party will be a Christianized fascist state. The liberal class a creature of corporate power, captive to the war industry and the security state, unable or unwilling to ameliorate the prolonged economic insecurity and misery of the working class, blinded by a self-righteous woke ideology that reeks of hypocrisy and disingenuousness and bereft of any political vision, is the bedrock on which the Christian fascists who have coalesced in cult-like mobs around Donald Trump, have built their terrifying movement.
Hedges goes on to blame Bill Clinton, who he says “conspired” to ship jobs overseas. He also rails against liberals for failing to understand that fascism is the inevitable result of “bankrupt liberalism.”
Hedges talks as if Christian fascists sprung full-formed out of the 90s when the US began to deindustrialize. But of course that’s nonsense; there were fascists in the US long before Clinton was born. They ruled large portions of the country, and/or all of the country depending on how you want to look at it. Trump is foreshadowed to some degree by Hitler, but he’s also very much the child of native genocide, of the Confederacy, of the Klan, of Jim Crow—of homegrown racist violence and authoritarian rule. To say fascism is an offshoot of liberal capitalism’s failures is to postulate an America of shining pre-fascist liberalism and equality. That America did not exist.
It's also to postulate an America without any mechanism of change. Marx believed that economic hardship and the oppression of the working class would lead to revolution and the worker’s paradise. But leftists like Hedges seem to have lost faith in the utopia; economic anxiety leads now, not to communism, but to the bamboozlement of the working-class heroes of history, who are drugged into a stupor by oppression or pushed into fascist cults. Hedges attacks liberals for not learning the lessons of fascism—that lesson being, apparently, that the lower classes are just waiting to embrace bigotry and atrocity.
It’s striking that Hedges and Hedges-like writers don’t actually speak to working-class readers, or offer any particular antifascist program. The energy all goes into lambasting liberals in power, and haranguing them to basically be nicer in order to forestall the fascist apocalypse. The furious rhetoric suggests radicalism, but the actual program comes carefully self-neutered. If oppression only empowers the right, if economic anxiety leads nowhere but despair and fascism, if antiracism is just a liberal dodge (as Hedges suggests by adopting the right wing pejorative “woke”), then where can we look for liberation?
Luckily, Hedges grim vision is based on his grim but flawed analysis. The truth is that oppression does not lead to fascism. On the contrary, the people directly targeted by fascist oppression in the US have a long, determined history of fighting back, from fugitive self-emancipated Black people to the Civil Rights Movement to Stonewall to #NoDAPL to the George Floyd protests to the current wave of labor action. None of these were total victories. But they demonstrate that marginalized people at the business end of economic exploitation and fascist violence don’t need to turn to indifference or christofascism.
Hedges’ confused class-first politics of asking liberals to think of the fascism is blinkered and useless. But there are alternative in a history of organizing and struggle. Donate to an abortion fund. Join a library board or school board or union. Protest. Organize. Christian fascism landed with Columbus, who cut off the hands of indigenous people when they didn’t get him enough gold, and it’s been with us ever since. But so has resistance.
Comments
no; we already had more than enough fascists, unfortunately.
Ian Morris
shipping jobs a lot of jobs overseas was not a good decision but it didn't lead to people becoming fascists
Ian Morris
chris hedges has had issues for a long time, i saw some of his stuff in a library copy of adbusters from the early 2010s and it was not good
