Fascism is an insufficient term, as it denies the intimacy between liberal and far right forces. In this week’s newsletter, we present ten theses to understand this ‘intimate embrace’ and the rise of this far right of a special type.
Also, Guerilla History pod companion episode to go with the article.
What really struck me was Thesis Five: the far right of a special type provides a partial answer to the loneliness epidemic that comes with advanced capitalist alienation. It doesn’t build real community or friendships or relationships, it’s more like everyone being in the same fandom. They wear signifier merchandise and signal to each other with specialized language and all consume the same significant cultural products, but they don’t actually build real community.
Instead they build ephemeral pseudo-anonymous online communities and temporary community through mass mobilization (rallies, marches, etc). They often don’t know each other by their real names, or anything about each other’s families, or their tastes outside of what they use to signal how antiwoke they are to each other.
But this is the closest thing millions of people have to community, even while the epidemic of loneliness continues untreated.
Building community is a radical act.
This reminds me of something that I’ve been pondering for some time now. I heard it said that fascism is a process that aims to minimize the set of people it is acceptable to have empathy for, and this certainly leads to the sort of hyper individualist atomization we see among the working class. Theses five touches on how this atomization is expressed and subsequently manipulated indirectly as opposed to a direct manifestation of state power
Good read, thanks for sharing this
I think the atomization works backwards onto empathy too - it’s hard to be empathetic to a faceless mass of people that you have no connection to or community with. There’s definitely a feedback loop between atomization and the far right of a special type - the atomization pushes people to the right, the right provides a false solution to the atomization and thus attracts atomized people into its ranks, the atomization doesn’t actually get resolved and so it pushes people even further to the right, etc.
Building community, itself, requires empathy. That’s yet another feedback loop, where atomization creates further atomization.
