Opinion • Brian Whitener • October 31, 2024 • Leer en castellano

Next week’s elections in the US are an important crossroads from which we can look backwards, and an important moment to analyze the current balance of forces. With the far-right outside of the White House over the last four years, their initiative has found other outlets—particularly on the state and local levels. It is here the authoritarian and fascist project has been advanced, and which is worth tracking, if only to intuit future developments.

The advance of late fascism, as Alberto Toscano has termed it, is of global concern. We’ve learned to stop looking for direct comparisons with past fascisms, particularly European. We’ve also learned that, historically, fascist possibilities nestle inside capitalism wherever it puts down roots. While the conversation has moved beyond formulaic comparisons (like, is or isn’t a Trump a fascist, which has now in the final stages of the campaign become a major Democrat talking point), mapping how and where fascist advances have been made remains a priority. 

In this respect, Clara Zetkin’s The Struggle Against Fascism, written in 1923 during the first years of the battle against European fascism, is clarifying. She argues fascism roots in the “dissolution of the capitalist economy and the bourgeois state,” and points out fascism’s distinctive characteristics are political violence and its “mass character.” Zetkin tracks the crossover movement of fascist projects into the state itself, where they are nourished by the power and resources found there, turning political violence and mass support into a virulent form of governance. 

The far right in the streets and on social networks

Between 2015 and 2021, the most fertile sites for the crossover work in the United States were online and in the growth of far-right groups themselves. The meme wars of the 2016 campaign and Trump presidency have died down, partially due to the banning of certain figures from X (formerly known as Twitter) and the transition of others to Telegram, Truth Social, and other platforms. Elon Musk’s purchase of then-Twitter, return of once-banned far-right accounts and Musk’s own hard-turn to the far-right have reversed these trends to a certain extent.  

The protagonism of far-right street groups has also receded. Some have been done in by internal struggle, others by anti-fascist and popular push-back (partially after Charlottesville, where a neo-nazi drove his vehicle into an anti-racist protest in 2017, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens). Others, most famously the Proud Boys, have been undone by prosecutions after the failed January 6, 2021 coup. This does not mean these groups no longer exist; rather many have recomposed and are gaining strength, with those in prison petitioning for pardons if their leader of choice is elected. 

In the media sphere a dual dynamic has been at play. After years of Trump attacks for being insufficiently loyal and a major lawsuit (and a $787 million settlement) Fox News was stopped publicizing the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. This led to the mainstreaming of Newsmax and One America News, two cable and online news channels willing to promote almost any line coming from the far-right media ecosystem. While Newsmax in particular rode a bump from Fox’s firing of Tucker Carlson—most likely due to his “escalating toxicity”—2024 has been a harder year for both outlets. Viewers have dropped—particularly at Newsmax—and both have settled defamation suits in the last months over lies about the 2020 election. 

Alongside restrictions on the more popular social media platforms, as well as the far-right’s movement to platforms with more anonymity, an established far-right and far-right adjacent cultural sphere has emerged, particularly in podcasts. 

Among the top ten podcasts on Spotify are “dark web intellectual” Joe Rogan, brocaster Theo Von and Carlson, who has become a hard-right celebrity. The top 40 list also includes far-right media personalities Candice Owens and Ben Shapiro. Among Owens’ highlights are claiming that TikTok makes men gay and defending Kayne West’s antisemitism. For his part, Shapiro has made claims that “transgender people” suffer from mental illness and that Islam is inherently violent. These are only a few from a long list of barbarous statements. These kinds of ideas are now smoothly piped into the earbuds of millions every month. 

State level fascist advance

In the years since 2021, the protagonism of the far right has moved from streets into interfaces with the state, with two techniques having pride of place. 

The first appears directly out of a classic fascist playbook—mobilization of state forces against political opponents. The state of Florida has been the epicenter of this approach. In August 2022, police made a number of highly visible arrests of people who had allegedly voted “illegally” in the prior election. All had been approved by local election authorities and several had received official voter registration cards. In 2024, after enough signatures were collected to put an abortion amendment on the ballot, Florida state police knocked on the doors of those who signed the petition to “check” their signatures, which had already been approved as valid by the required state agency. 

The second approach—which is much more widespread—is what Jon D. Michaels and David L. Noll call vigilante federalism. “In battles over abortion, religion, sexuality, gender, and race, state legislatures are mass producing a new weapon,” write Michaels and Noll in their article “Vigilante Federalism.” “From Texas’s S.B. 8 to book bans and a flurry of bills empowering parents to sue schools that acknowledge LGBTQ+ identities or implement anti-racist curricula, state legislatures are enacting laws that call on private parties—and sometimes only private parties—to enforce their commands.” 

This has been the most prolific technique deployed to advance the late fascist agenda in the last few years. It has reached almost omnipresent proportions in states and localities with hard-right and conservative governments. 

A short list would include a Tennessee law that allows parents and teachers to sue for “monetary damages” if transgender students are allowed to use a restroom or locker room that  “doesn’t conform with their gender at birth”; laws across many states that allow books to be pulled from libraries based upon the filling out of an online form; and laws or policies in multiple states that allow parents to flag assignments, educators and schools that promote “divisive concepts” (for example, that teach the history of slavery or of LGBTQI+ social movements). This technique draws on a long history of para-state settler colonial violence, as well as more recent “stand your ground laws,” channeled through the figure of the vigilante, and updated for the digital age. 

The time to push back is now

The current balance of forces displays a powerful new overlap between a propensity for violence and a growing mass character. Techniques of vigilante federalism bring individuals into a state-led late fascist project. 

People don’t necessarily have to join a Neo-Nazi group and march, rather, merely by filling out an on-line form or flagging a school assignment they participate in the production of a new mass character which is anti-equality and in favor of white supremacy, patriarchy and violence. Reading this technique alongside the spread of the far-right adjacent media sphere, perhaps the most important shifts over the last four years have been in the normalization, in the building of a mass character of late fascism. 

Zetkin, whose main works were written not as retrospective accounts but in the midst of the fight against fascism, was clear-eyed on the role and the share of the blame that radicals bore for fascism’s emergence. 

“I must add that the Communist parties… actions have been insufficiently vigorous, their initiatives lacking in scope, and their penetration of the masses inadequate,” wrote Zetkin in 1923, a year after the March on Rome and Mussolini’s first government. 

While US antifascist groups have been successful and are now well-practiced in street confrontation and online battles–and there have been some new organizing like the For The People project as well many instances of local, state and national pushback by educators particularly–these most recent forms of attack and normalization have yet to receive a broad anti-fascist response. Recalling Zetkin’s words can spur us to action before it is too late.