Fascism is also mythopoetic insofar as its ideological system does not only seek to create new myths but also to create a kind of mythical reality, or an everyday life that stems from myth rather than fact.17 Fascists hope to produce a new kind of rationale envisioning a common destiny that can replace modern civilization. The person with authority is the one who can interpret these myths into real-world strategy through a sacralized process that defines and delimits the seen and the unseen, the thinkable and the unthinkable.
That which is most commonly encouraged through fascism is producerism, which augments working-class militancy against the “owner class” by focusing instead on the difference between “parasites” (typically Jews, speculators, technocrats, and immigrants) and the productive workers and elites of the nation. In this way, fascism can be both functionally cross class and ideologically anticlass, desiring a classless society based on a “natural hierarchy” of deserving elites and disciplined workers. By destroying parasites and deploying some variant of racial, national, or ethnocentric socialism, fascists promise to create an ideal state or suprastate—a spiritual entity more than a modern nation-state, closer to the unitary sovereignty of the empire than political systems of messy compromises and divisions of power. This spiritual entity of the future would require the annihilation of the contaminated modern world and a return to the myths of ancestral ties of blood and soil, culture, and language that bind the community together in spite of class antagonisms.18
The other side of the paranoid specter of the parasite or the cancer is the national community as an organic body—whether based on biological race theory or cultural-linguistic ethnocentrism. Fascism relies on the perception of a constituency producing, and produced by, an inherently natural process of hierarchy manifested by warrior elites embedded in the spiritual myths of the nation. In short, fascism is a syncretic form of ultranationalist ideology developed through patriarchal mythopoesis, which seeks the destruction of the modern world and the spiritual palingenesis (“rebirth”) of an organic community led by natural elites through the fusion of technological advancement and cultural tradition.
Why Does Fascism Matter Today?
Resentment and revenge are fascism’s prime emotions. A whole group identity—the “white working class”—emerged out of the financial crisis of 2008, forged through the crucible of resentment with a clear narrative. Promised under the Reagan administration that abandoning the labor movement would result in fast cash and easy gains, they pegged their hopes to middle-class values and neoliberal politicians throughout the 1990s. This group of people was instead uprooted over the coming decades, most clearly from the “Rust Belt” in the United States. A declassed economic movement that identified with middle-class aspirations in the 1990s and early 2000s now increasingly aligned itself with the “white working class.” It sees its downward trajectory as a sign of a greater collapse, the end times, and the annihilation of their country.19 As their anger builds, unity forms around demagogues catering to the darkest of anxieties and promising the rebirth of former greatness.20
The situation is similar in Europe, where Socialist parties have capitulated to austerity programs. Fascist ideology preys on the resulting anxiety and disillusionment. Fascists insist that a revolution must take place in order to replace the decadence of an unproductive ruling elite with a powerful elite that will return old privileges and advance a “new age” of health, spiritual greatness, and national unity. With the financial collapse, increasing antisystemic leftist protest movements, and the refugee crisis, the radical right and fascism have both expanded manifestly. The radical right’s victories in the 2014 European Parliament elections were perhaps the most eye-opening result of such rising stakes, which is in itself the product of decades of efforts from the radical right and fascists to prepare the way for their own success by sowing inflated statistics and prejudice among their populations.
In those elections, the French Front National gained a stunning quarter of the vote; neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn grabbed one in ten votes in Greece; more than one in four Danes voted for the xenophobic Danish People’s Party; more than one in ten cast ballots for the Islamophobic Dutch Party for Freedom; the notorious radical-right Austrian Freedom Party gained the vote of one in five citizens; and the virulently anti-Semitic Jobbik found the support of nearly one in nine Hungarian voters. In the United Kingdom, right-wing populist UK Independence Party (UKIP) took first place, beating out both the Labour and Conservative Parties with more than 26 percent of the vote. After the 2015 Paris attacks, the Front National beat its own record, taking in 28 percent of the vote and winning six regions in the first round of the 2015 local elections before mass tactical voting stymied their gains in the second round.21
As a result of rising tension linked to Islamist attacks, fascist violence increased drastically—in Germany for instance, attacks on refugee homes spiked more than fivefold in 2015.22 By late February 2016, the number of attacks had already reached 217, on pace to exceed the previous year by around 30 percent.23 In 2015’s national elections, Golden Dawn gained its best results in the Greek general election, Jobbik continued its rise, the Danish People’s Party won its highest ever gains, the Swiss People’s Party received similarly powerful returns of 30 percent, Slovakia’s neo-Nazi People’s Party Our Slovakia won 23 percent, and the Sweden Democrats advanced considerably. The year 2016 saw the rise of the right-wing Alternative for Germany party in local elections and a gripping presidential election in Austria, where the FPÖ obtained some 49 percent of the vote for president, narrowly missing the highest ceremonial post in the nation. The UKIP-driven Brexit referendum, laden with xenophobia, passed by a fraction of the British electorate, effectively completing the far-right hijacking of dissent against the EU. In Australia, Pauline Hanson’s United Australia Party won three seats in the senate, bringing mainstream credibility to a party that links radical-right politics with street-level fascism. The 2014 European Parliament elections were not a mere flash in the pan. The world is clearly at a turning point.
Islamophobic actions in the United States increased by sixteen times after September 11, 2001, and also tripled after the Paris attacks in 2015.24 The phenomenon of reaction is often lasting and cumulative, as well as spontaneous and decentralized. Islamophobia is also found in schools, where one antihate group noted that a rise in Islamophobic attacks has been registered across the last four years.25 However, homophobic, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and Islamophobic acts usually build off one another rather than off external attacks. Each violent act tends to embolden more, larger attacks, causing a surge of irrational anger and a larger creep of society toward angst, despair, and hatred.
In the United States, the Southern Poverty Law Center registered a decline in white nationalist organizations in 2014 but warned that this decline signaled both the underground movement of the Ku Klux Klan and the growth of decentralized, “lone wolf” violence carried out by the same sovereign citizens who have found rallying points at Bundy Ranch, the Sugar Pine Mine, and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. The wave of church burnings conducted by a small, white supremacist Asatru cell throughout 2015, along with the massive antimosque movement, indicate a growing militancy amid the increasing polarization of politics. Indeed, the number of Klan groups more than doubled from 72 in 2014 to 190 in 2015, while the number of hate crimes against Muslims increased by 67 percent.26
The popularity of the Donald Trump campaign mainstreamed white nationalist organizing and web hubs, which saw Internet traffic increase to record levels. This occurred because Trump’s platform derived from white nationalist talking points, such as the elimination of the 14th Amendment and the expulsion of eleven million immigrants, while Trump himself spread white nationalist images and memes. What was exposed by Trump’s campaign, then, was the increasing tolerance for white nationalist ideas among the mainstream, as well as the increasing radicalization of politics in the United States and the influence of fascism.27
As one analyst correctly pointed out, the Trump campaign relied on a dispersed “authoritarianism” among the populace and is not just based on a singular leader.28 This analysis forces us to look not simply at demagogues as the “evil doers,” but at the “affective economy” of habits