Never mind Hitler: "Late Fascism" is here, and it doesn't need Hugo Boss uniforms

Donald Trump’s name appears only a couple of times in “Late Fascism,” the dense, concise and intellectually ambitious new book from Italian philosopher and political theorist Alberto Toscano. That’s obviously a considered decision, and there are more than enough not-very-veiled references to Trump and the MAGA “movement” to make clear that Toscano understands the symbolic importance of America’s homegrown would-be dictator to the phenomenon he’s trying to delineate. 

For that matter, the notorious European political leaders of the 1930s with whom Trump is frequently compared — you know who I mean, the strutting Italian peacock and the little Austrian with the ‘stache — don’t play starring roles in “Late Fascism” either. That’s partly because Toscano is more concerned with political and philosophical theories of fascism and anti-fascism, with the backstage machinery, so to speak, rather than the actors facing the crowd. 

But beyond that, it’s because Toscano’s central argument — as I read this admittedly challenging work — is that fascism should be understood as a “dynamic” or a “process” unfolding throughout recent history, not as a “singular event” associated with charismatic leaders, mass rallies and fashion-forward uniforms that emerged during a global economic crisis and then was defeated, only to resurface unexpectedly in the 21st century. 

Toscano writes in his preface that he does not “intend ‘late fascism’ to operate like an academic brand,” meaning a trendy label embraced as an all-purpose explanation, à la “neoliberalism,” “late capitalism” or “globalization.” He may protest too much: “Late Fascism” is so loaded with moments of insight and illumination into the tormented historical, political and psychological roots of our current crisis that such an outcome may be inevitable. 

Although Toscano never provides a single straightforward definition of what fascism is or isn’t, his thought and language are so precise and specific that he can’t be accused of flinging the term at every right-of-center political formation that contains elements of nostalgia. Until recently he was primarily known as a translator and scholar steeped in the work of European leftist titans like Alain Badiou, Georges Bataille and Antonio Negri. But with this book he stakes a claim as a major voice in the 21st-century renovation of Marxism, especially alert to the ways that the collision of racism, antisemitism and corporate capitalism have fueled a global mood of crisis and opened the door for a “late fascist” renaissance. 

Toscano’s entire book can be read as a taxonomy of fascism, but he comes closest to a working definition in his discussion of German philosopher Ernst Bloch’s “Heritage of Our Times,” a “protean, fascinating and unsettling work” first published in 1935 but not available in English until 1991, which seems startlingly germane to the contemporary moment. Writing near the beginning of the Nazi regime, Bloch understood fascism as a “perverted utopian promise,” in Toscano’s phrase, with a strange relationship to time and history. That promise appeals most strongly to social groups who find themselves “somehow out of sync with the rationalizing present of capitalism,” offering them a fraudulent reactivation of “unfulfilled pasts and unrealized presents.” 

That strikes me as an almost perfect description of Trump’s most loyal supporters: As reams of social-science research have confirmed, they are not necessarily poor or unemployed or economically struggling in any objective sense — but they clearly perceive themselves as “out of sync” with the dominant social order, and feel enraged or cheated out of something they cannot define but believe they deserve.

The problem for leftist opponents of fascism, as Bloch sees it (and as Toscano seems to agree), is that fascist ideology is not purely or entirely deceptive; it also contains fragments of “an old and romantic antagonism to capitalism, derived from deprivations in contemporary life, with a longing for a vague ‘other.’” To put that in more familiar terms, fascism is driven by mythic yearning — whether for an imaginary premodern “Aryan” folk culture or for America’s ahistorical lost greatness — and the rationalist counternarratives about economic progress or class conflict variously put forward by socialism and liberalism have a tough time competing with that.

There is an ironic contradiction within the MAGA version of fascist mythology, however, which few mainstream commentators have noticed. As Toscano writes, Trump’s movement is conspicuously driven by nostalgia for America’s postwar affluence, for “the ‘Fordist’ heyday of Big Capital and Big Labor (generally coded as male and white) … for a racialized and gendered image of the socially recognized patriotic industrial worker.” Yet that era of rising if unequal prosperity was fueled by progressive taxation, widespread union membership and an unprecedented explosion of government spending and social welfare programs, all of which are not just anathema to the MAGA creed but unimaginable under current political conditions. The Trumpian false utopia promises the benefits of social democracy, in other words, without compelling the ruling class to pay for them.

Bloch’s book is only one of the numerous little-known or underappreciated works that Toscano draws upon, although usual suspects like Hannah Arendt, Antonio Gramsci and Theodor Adorno certainly appear as well. He offers a powerful re-reading of 1970s work by Black radicals Angela Davis and George Jackson, arguing that they offer a prophetic understanding of fascism as a “differential” process, in which some groups effectively live in a police state while others experience a reasonably functional democracy. In a later chapter, Toscano resurrects another ‘70s radical, the Italian literary critic Furio Jesi, whose extraordinary insights into the “religion and mythology of death” in right-wing culture were entirely new to me.

Toscano’s understanding of fascism as a kind of mythic current — both in the liquid and the electrical sense — that runs below the surface of postwar society but is never entirely absent, leads to one of his most compelling and, no doubt, most controversial points: It is a comforting but dangerous delusion, he argues, to view liberal democracy and fascism as polar opposites, or to assume that we know where one stops and the other begins. 

He attacks this question in a number of ways throughout the book, beginning with the observation that “our knee-jerk identification of fascism with a monolithic, bureaucratic state and its opposition to liberalism in all its forms” is misguided. Contrary to Arendt’s oft-quoted assertion that totalitarianism “aims at abolishing freedom, even at eliminating human spontaneity in general,” Toscano offers ample evidence that both German and Italian fascism defined themselves as forces of liberation, offering a project of “racial imperialism” based on a masculine-identified notion of freedom drawn from all those vague myths about the past and linked to the “authoritarian rebel” personality described by Erich Fromm, “who, on the basis of their inner strength and integrity, fight those forces that block their freedom and independence.”

It’s impossible to read that quotation without recognizing an early version of the MAGA conception of “liberty from so-called ‘medical totalitarianism,’ for and of property ownership, or as a marker of civilizational difference from migrants and their religions,” as Toscano puts it. When Italian fascism first came to power just over a century ago, he writes, it was not as a “totalitarian” fusion of political and economic forces but “as a particularly virulent strain of state-led anti-statism,” which is about as pithy a summary of the federal government during Trump’s (first) term as one could offer.

Toscano’s deeper point, although he doesn’t exactly put it this way, is that “democracy” and “fascism” exist on a continuum. They share the same fundamental conception of individual or “bourgeois” liberty, ultimately drawn from the likes of John Locke, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke (all of whom would no doubt be horrified by every aspect of 21st-century politics). It’s self-flattering nonsense to treat them as binary states of light and darkness, or to resort to idiotic metaphors about America’s sacred democracy teetering on the edge of a bottomless abyss. 

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I think many of us understand this on a basic level — I’ve written about it a couple of times myself — and feel more than a little squidgy about the relentless torrent of political and journalistic sermons urging us to embrace the last chance to save democracy from the red-hatted barbarians who will storm the gates if they can actually get off the sofa. (Which is exactly what we were told about the last election, not to mention the one before that, and also what we will be told about the next one.)

You don’t have to be an acknowledged Marxist like Toscano to look at the political reality created by Citizens United, the Federalist Society and the Electoral College (none of which can be blamed on Trump or his followers) and ask what democracy Joe Biden and his party claim to be defending. Fewer than one in five American voters live in a state likely to be contested in this year’s presidential election, and the widely dreaded rematch between Trump and Biden will probably be decided by the whims and grievances of 100,000 or so “swing voters” scattered across those states. 

Furthermore, both Mussolini and Hitler first gained power through electoral victories, and only gradually subsumed the state apparatus to their purposes. Toscano points out that the Nazis never bothered to replace the constitution of the Weimar Republic, which theoretically remained in force right through 1945. That’s one of many occasions when he observes that the fascist reputation for ruthless efficiency and administrative competence is completely undeserved. (He also argues that the pop-culture presentation of Nazis as stylish, sophisticated and erotic is ludicrous projection.)

Donald Trump’s attempted coup of 2021, let’s remember, was scripted by lawyers who meant to contain it within the purported constitutional guardrails of democracy. In many respects they hoped to emulate the notorious Compromise of 1877, when a presidential election that was ultimately decided in Congress brought an end to Reconstruction, set democracy back by many decades and launched the Jim Crow era, in what could fairly be described as a capitulation to proto-fascist forces in the white South. 

Whether the Capitol attack of Jan. 6 was part of that original script or was (more likely) an improvised response to its failure, that became the moment when it was acceptable for mainstream voices to label Trump’s movement as fascist. Toscano would argue that they were finally, and reluctantly, naming a tendency that was present in our politics long before Trump, and will be there long after he’s gone.