Fascism: Modern Threat or Facade?
Welcome back, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I was so grateful to get to speak with 2008 vice presidential candidate for the Green Party, Rosa Clemente, on our last episode, And she laid out what it's like to break free from the constraints of typical Democratic or Republican politics and cultivate a politic of your own. Her early political activism grew out of an experience at a rally where she felt the candidate couldn't fully understand or represent her perspective as a black Puerto Rican woman. From there, she worked within the Green Party and the National Hip Hop Political Convention to build platforms that better address her needs and concerns as well as those of forgotten communities that don't get a lot of visibility and mainstream candidates' stump speeches.
Emily Williams:Poor and working class people, incarcerated people, racial and ethnic minorities, folks whose religion or immigration status or sexuality or gender identity make them targets for discrimination, marginalization, and abuse. Rosa isn't our 1st guest to share their frustration with Democratic politics. Each of them expressed disappointment with the party failing to live up to its rhetoric, and that's important because the Democrats are purporting to be the only thing standing between the survival of American democracy and full fledged fascism. We keep hearing about this existential threat to democracy in the form of rising fascism, But where is it coming from? How serious is it?
Emily Williams:What can we do to stop it? Is it already here? And should we be concerned that if the self described defenders of liberal democracy aren't living up to their ideals, that they'll be just as susceptible to fascist influence as those they're accusing of propagating it? I'm Emily Williams, executive director of the Arcus Center For Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College. This is Beyond Voting.
Emily Williams:We started this show for people like you and me, people who care about making a difference in the world, people who want to share in redesigning the democracy we deserve outside of the typical political binary. This podcast is rooted in our conviction that democracy requires more participation than just voting. It's up to all of us to take action if we wanna see real change. We'll feature conversations with leaders, activists, and educators discussing the state of our country's institutions, ongoing systems of oppression, and most importantly, how we, the people, can take critical actions in pursuit of true equity and justice. What do you think of when you hear the word fascism?
Emily Williams:I'll bet you picture images of military processions, raging authoritarian leaders giving stirring speeches from their balconies to massive crowds below, and throngs of innocent people being forced from their homes through violent state mandated pogroms. That all seems like such a far off conception. It's the kind of stuff we should only have to witness in history books, museums, and movies. While we may know that it's possible intellectually, it seems far from probable in these more enlightened times. For most Americans, it definitely doesn't seem like something we believe could happen here.
Emily Williams:Yet seeing that growing fascist threat when we turn on the news and hearing about neo fascist aligned political groups gaining prominence makes that distant possibility seem a bit closer to an imminent reality. Neo fascist groups are spreading, and they're not just the domain of small militias and fringe political movements. They're gaining significant political footholds in governments across the globe, including here in the US where we've seen the effective dismantling of public health departments in Michigan, the banning of books and diversity studies in schools and universities in Florida, and threatening to jail doctors, teachers, and librarians for simply doing their jobs. My guest today is no stranger to addressing questions of global fascism and what it looks like in our modern world. Alberto Toscano is a critical theorist and professor in the School of Communications at Simon Fraser University.
Emily Williams:He's also codirector of the Centre For Philosophy in Critical Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. In his book, late fascism, race, capitalism, and the politics of crisis, Alberto says that despite our tendency to use familiar European examples to identify modern fascist threats, for example, Mussolini in Italy or Hitler in Nazi Germany, anti colonialist activists and black American thinkers from W. E. B. Du Bois to Angela Davis have offered examples much more relevant to this moment.
Emily Williams:He points to their work to help better frame our understanding of the rise of modern fascism and the immediate threat it poses to liberal democracies like our own. I got to speak with Alberto earlier this summer about what modern fascist movements look like where we see real examples of anti fascist resistance and what we can learn particularly from black radical traditions about how to fight back against the spread of new fascisms. Alberto, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome.
Alberto Toscano:Thank you so much for having me, Emily.
Emily Williams:So I read that you are reluctant to define fascism, but can you talk about ways that are useful for the average person to identify fascism when they see it? For example, how does the average voter who needs to be able to understand it, particularly in this election, How can they use an understanding of fascism to help determine their vote?
Alberto Toscano:It's interesting that we're having a conversation about fascism in electoral terms. In many ways, of course, we often think of fascism as the diametrical opposite of liberal democracy. If we think of the ways in which the discourse around fascism has entered into mainstream conversation, especially in the United States, think of the way people talk about fascism on MSNBC or in liberal mainstream media, it's often viewed as that. Right? The possibility of a complete collapse and a complete overturning of the principles of liberal democracy.
Alberto Toscano:Now that's an interesting way of approaching the question of fascism because it centers a dimension that of elections, but also maybe sidelines other issues that we might want to attend to, like the presence of fascist tendencies or fascist potentials in the ways in which our society is already, organized. So on the one hand, I could, you know, think of a whole set of symptoms, red flags that a voter or a concerned member of the public might attend to.
Emily Williams:I think that would be really helpful because it's like, what are some of the fascist tendencies that we're already living under, but we actually don't realize it?
Alberto Toscano:Let's take one really distinctive element of the present platform and campaign of the Republican party. Right?
Emily Williams:Mhmm.
Alberto Toscano:Mass deportations now. You're basically advancing a slogan that is trying to elicit mass support, and that mass dimension is definitely critical to fascism. Right? It's not just simply authoritarian politics. Right?
Alberto Toscano:It's an authoritarian politics that desires mass buy in. Right? It's a politics of reaction and domination, but it's also, in its own most generic way, democratic as in it is demanding a certain demos, a certain people to back it. And in fact, as as one saw very readily in many of the speeches at the Republican National Convention, that demand for the stigmatization, repression, incarceration, and deportation of undocumented people working in the United States was presented really as a as a democratic demand. Right?
Alberto Toscano:It was presented as well, you know, this is what the people, obviously, of specific subsection thereof want, the left behind, the forgotten, etcetera, etcetera. All of those, you know, dog whistle kind of terms. You know what, I guess, in the first Trump inauguration, he called American carnage. Right? This idea that the country's falling apart, that it's being contaminated.
Alberto Toscano:All of that discourse, of course, has a long legacy in movements of the far right and and and fascist movements, as does this idea that only a policy of stigmatization and repression of certain othered groups from migrants to trans women to pro Palestine protesters, etcetera, will allow a kind of renaissance to take place. Right? That all of these groups and all of these people and all of their rights are a, hindrance to the coming together and the well-being of an organic national community defined, either explicitly or implicitly, in restrictive and gendered and racialized terms. And I think that is surely a symptom, you know, if not of maybe fascism in a textbook, political science definition of the term, nevertheless, of what Angela Davis would have called fascism as a process. Right?
Emily Williams:That's so interesting, Alberto, because, you know, when you are mentioning this great renaissance, you know, we heard that with, like, Make America Great Again. And I think in 2016, it was much more around white nationalism and maybe even until just recently where we've seen Trump trying to court particularly the Black community and doing so in very visible ways, right, having spokespersons who are members of the Black community now presenting at prominent conferences of black professionals. So, one, how do you see that factoring into this, like, notion of renaissance, and what's the relationship between fascism and racism, but also sexism and capitalism? I think
Alberto Toscano:that's an absolutely crucial question, and I know there are a lot of scholars and researchers and anti racist activists working on this in the United States and beyond. I know there's very important work that, for instance, Joe Lowndes and Daniel Hosang Martinez are doing on the multiracial right, I believe, in a book that is coming out in the autumn. And they have made also another text kind of a compelling argument for at least suspending what is perhaps a comforting common sense on the anti racist left that takes the nexus between fascism or the far right and white supremacy as both kind of linear and homogeneous. Right? So that you don't really have to think about it very much.
Alberto Toscano:And, of course, it is not to minimize the continued structuring presence of white supremacy to the US far right to also need to recognize both just as a demographic fact, but also as a strategic reality that this has been a very significant move for them. I remember reading this there was very good material around the time of, I I think, both the 2016 and 2020 election by Mike Davis. I remember on the Latinx vote for Trump in California and Texas, and, you know, and he was pointing in many ways also to the political economy of this vote. Right? So people were astounded that border counties with Latinx majorities in in Texas, for instance, would vote for Trump.
Alberto Toscano:And he pointed out, yes. But, you know, the majority of people there are dependent on working for border services in one sense or another. Right? So there's all sorts of material ways in which people are incorporated into a state apparatus that depends also on the repression of migrants. Right?
Alberto Toscano:But I also think it's important to note, at least this was one of the statistics that I saw recently, that it's fairly vital for the Republican Party to engage in those strategies because it seems that their proportion of, let's say, like, the white male vote hasn't really changed very much. Right? And so they're really working on the margins that, of course, they still get a small portion, at least in in statistics, of the male African American vote in the US. But getting 9% or getting 25% makes a difference. Right?
Alberto Toscano:Or it can make all the difference given that we're talking about these kind of swing states. And I think the xenophobic politics of centering the migrant as the existential threat, but also as a threat to the livelihoods of racialized people. Right? And this was done in the crassest way possible in that first presidential debate by Trump. Right?
Alberto Toscano:They're invading across the border and taking black jobs, whatever that means. Right? Like, you know, that was clearly, like, a key talking point that he was had decided to go on. So I think there's a way of cloaking or blurring the structuring racism of the whole project by massively displacing its most explicit aspect onto migrants themselves. Before coming to North America, I was living in the United Kingdom.
Alberto Toscano:I was there during the whole Brexit process, right, and all the forms of nationalism and and racism that that involved. And there, too, albeit in a totally different racial formation with a totally different history having to do with empire and Commonwealth and all that, nevertheless, that move of trying to enlist some racialized or minority populations into a nationalist project predicated on a kind of xenophobic stigmatization of migrants was also significant. Right? And, again, in most cases, it wasn't like the majority of black and brown folks in the UK voted for the right or voted for Brexit, but it was enough. Right?
Alberto Toscano:It was enough to make a difference.
Emily Williams:I think it's so interesting because if I think back to and I know that this is what you're telling us not to do. But if I think back to my original education about the holocaust in Germany and how fascism works, what I understand to be central to it or what I've understood from that education is that, 1, you have to have a a population to scapegoat. And then, 2, that there's a really extreme violence in an attempt to get rid of that population, which then galvanizes this nationalistic populous that you mentioned previously. I think about that and how now we're in kind of this moment where the far right actually does have to court populations that are probably previously would scapegoat, such as black Americans, such as Latinos, and others who are crossing the border to live in the US. So given those similarities, what is the danger of talking about fascism in terms of analogies to the past, particularly the Eurocentric ones?
Emily Williams:And then can you say more about how this moment is actually different from those examples?
Alberto Toscano:Yeah. I think that's an excellent question because so much of the contemporary discourse around the menace of fascism centers on analogies to a rather streamlined, at times even cartoonish version of the 19 twenties thirties. Also, on this notion that fascism is the diabetical opposite, the complete nemesis of liberalism. Right? And so fascism is this kind of exception, aberration, pathology, and so on.
Alberto Toscano:Now if we want to think of where the important disanalogies are, I think in hindsight, we tend to almost only think about Italian and German fascism, and then we also tend to think of Italian fascism almost through the lens of of German fascism. Right? And so, for instance, taking certain forms of racial violence as defining a fascism, which might be different if we looked at other forms. Right? And, of course, there's a lot of scholarship now that is rightly expanding that prism and making us think about how the Japanese regime in the 19 thirties was in many ways an explicitly fascist and imperialist regime and all sorts of other formations.
Alberto Toscano:But I think there's a number of issues that one needs to take into consideration. One is that those fascisms that I refer to as interwar or post World War 1 were in many ways defined by the mass experience of warfare. Right? So most people who participated in fascist movements, most people who engaged in the militia like and street violence that gave rise to them, most of its leaders were war veterans, were people who had killed, were people who had been in trenches, and so on. Mhmm.
Alberto Toscano:This is a very different, just sociologically speaking
Emily Williams:Mhmm.
Alberto Toscano:Situation than the one that we're in now. Fascism was and this is something that I think Du Bois pointed out very sharply in a number of texts also in the 19 thirties, you know, was a byproduct of an age of imperialism, right, in many ways. The explicit program of both Italian fascism as was made evident in its brutal invasion of Ethiopia as was the case with Nazi Germany's plans to basically reproduce US settler colonialism except on its eastern Slavic frontier. These were, in their own minds, right, imperial and settler colonial projects that had arrived late, that were trying to do in the industrialized first half of the twenty century what the British and the French and others had done in the 19th. Right?
Alberto Toscano:And, again, that's a very different context than the one that we find ourselves in today. Right?
Emily Williams:Right. And let's just sum that up just a little bit, because if we, like, think about, like, that colonialist project, it was also about building wealth and then spreading power throughout the world. So if that's what we have and they're trying to reproduce what the colonial powers were doing, you know, France, even Belgium
Alberto Toscano:Mhmm. Mhmm.
Emily Williams:Britain, a bit of the US. Right? They were trying to reproduce that. Okay. So that's what we have previously and historically.
Emily Williams:So what is it now?
Alberto Toscano:The difference between, you know, these two vastly separate moments I think we could almost summarize in terms of the ideological difference between a border and a frontier. Right? So the the fascism that was an effort to reproduce or accelerate this kind of settler colonial and and imperial project, very explicit, again, both for Italian fascism and German Nazism, saw every existing border of the nation state which they were in as limiting or illegitimate. Right? Whether it was, you know, the Italian state already making claims in certain parts of what were then later Yugoslavia, etcetera, or much farther afield claiming that they've been passed over.
Alberto Toscano:Right? Whether it's in the Berlin Conference of the 18 eighties or they've been passed over in the scramble for Africa and were entitled. And so a lot of the claims were claims to entitlement to land and resources, and therefore, it was an expansive
Emily Williams:And people.
Alberto Toscano:And people. And it and therefore, it was a it was an expansive vision, expansionist vision. And I think instead, if you think of the mentality, the slogans, and the appeal of contemporary far right and fascistic movements, they are towards closure, I mean, in the Republican and and Trump sense in the most caricature way possible. Right? I'll be dictator for a day.
Alberto Toscano:Was that that famous, infamous speech? I'll be dictator for a day. Close the border and drill, drill, drill. Right? Like a very weird, you know, which is actually a strange inversion of a sort of, imperialist fascist imaginary.
Alberto Toscano:So I think one of the things that defines the contemporary far right in the global north. Right? Because we haven't had any conversation here yet about all sorts of other far right movements in Latin America, Modi's India, and elsewhere. Mhmm. What defines it, I think, in the global north is the sense of a declining privilege or entitlement that is at risk, a risk in a kind of pincer movement between, you know, migrant masses coming through the border and then, of course, the threat of China, let's say, which is a kind of other obsession, certainly, of Trump.
Alberto Toscano:But the sense is not one of expansion or of increasing resources, but in terms of a form of kind of closure and and protection, where the border is then imagined as the solution, the almost kind of fetish object of this far right politics because it stops the intrusion, the the infiltration of everything that is both a material threat, but also, right, like a psychic and personal threat as well, which is why you then see, which is, again, very typical and has been going on for decades, this vile exaggeration of criminality, right, regardless of any statistic or, you know, the invention of these categories like migrant crime. Right? Like, as if that's a thing. So I think it does change the character of the far right's own ideology and politics. However, just a a small parenthesis, that does not mean that we don't have a lot of rhetorical and ideological continuities.
Alberto Toscano:Right? Take something like the great replacement. Mussolini was talking about the great replacement in the 19 And
Emily Williams:just break that down for people. Just break down the great replacement for people.
Alberto Toscano:Yeah. So the idea that, I mean, takes various forms, all of them, you know, profoundly racist. But the idea that there's either a process or usually a plot, a conspiracy or a project to replace the white populations of either the United States or, very popular, of course, in the context of the European far right with migrant populations from the South. Right?
Emily Williams:Yeah. And we also just might say, like, I think this is what you were getting at at earlier in this conversation where it's like this notion that white men are gonna be replaced by Latino men who are crossing the border or black men who are coming into economic privilege and power. Right? That they will be replaced. Yeah.
Alberto Toscano:It's a notion that ultimately emerges in the context of the very powerful movements for decolonization at the beginning of 20th century. Right? And, again, in the wake of World War 1, a lot of these ideologues, many of them American, like, I think it's Lothrop Stoddard, who writes this book called The Rising Tide of Color. There's this whole panic amongst certain intellectual caters in the west that white civilization, right, is being threatened by the emergence, by what it again, the rising tide of color. Right?
Alberto Toscano:In fact, Stoddart has a very public, I think, radio debate, where, apparently, Du Bois wipes the floor with him over a thistle question. But it's super you know, this stuff is selling tens of thousands of copies, it really but in that context, the debate it's not presented in terms of migration per se. It's presented in terms of the increasing demographic presence, but also political power of the darker nations. Right? It's a threat that somebody like Du Bois says, yes, of course.
Alberto Toscano:The darker nations should have more power, and this, you know, racial world order should be overturned. Right? That threat is presented as global, and then this whole issue of natality, which, let's not forget, is a complete obsession of the contemporary far right. Right?
Emily Williams:And you mean natality as being native to one's No.
Alberto Toscano:No. Natality in the sense of in the sense of birth rates. Right? Like white birth rates. Again, a debate present in the twenties.
Alberto Toscano:Mussolini writes about as well in the twenties and thirties. So it's already like that is continuous. Right?
Emily Williams:Mhmm.
Alberto Toscano:But once the theme is continuous, the context is very different. So the context now is not the idea of an anti colonial world revolution or not the idea of the rising power of the so called third world. Rather, it's presented as a political and demographic issue within the boundaries of the nation state that could be resolved with the border. Right? Whilst instead in the 19 twenties thirties, the fascist imagining was, yes, well, this can be resolved by, like, a racial project of world domination and imperialism, right, such as the Italian or the German one.
Alberto Toscano:So in many sense, you could say that there was an expansionary and offensive dimension Yep. To that fascist imaginary. Yeah. Whilst now, the imaginary is a defensive one. It's, like, pull up the drawbridge, create the fortress, and hold on to the limited resources.
Alberto Toscano:Right? And the fantasy of what to return to is also a very different fantasy. The fantasy of the contemporary, even kind of fascistic far right, isn't some kind of utopian. It's basically some weird version of a kind of militarized leave it to beaver America, right, where it's like white people and white ticket fences and middle class jobs, etcetera. It's not the idea of a future that's totally different than the present.
Emily Williams:Thank you for breaking it down like that. And I just I wanna say a couple of things. Number 1, for our Gen Z listeners, Leave It TO Beaver was a TV show that came on in black and white, that was really about this white American nuclear family where the mother stayed home, had traditional housewife duties, and the father went to work every day with his briefcase. And there was Beaver, the son doing traditional boy things like playing in the dirt, for example. So you all can look that up on YouTube if, if you're interested.
Emily Williams:And then also I wanna point out, Alberto, that you're using this term called political imaginary. Right? And I think that that's so critical for listeners to understand because, you know, these things that these new fascists are relying upon, these ideas are actually not true. So, like, this notion that somehow immigrants are coming to take all of the jobs and are gonna threaten the white establishment in this country, that's not true. But they're talking about it as though it's imminent and it's going to happen.
Emily Williams:And so I think that that's really important that we think about what is a political imaginary, both so that we can understand the way that fascists are operating today, but also so that those of us who care about social justice and who want to accomplish social justice goals with our activism, we can use our political imaginary to think about other possibilities of actually an inclusive democracy. And thank you so much for breaking down, like, the historical examples of fascism because I think that's it it is an important reference. And now we see that neo fascists are using the mythology of traditional gender roles. Right? Have you heard of trad wives?
Alberto Toscano:Mhmm.
Emily Williams:And they're using particularly trad wives to appeal to younger generations. So tell us this, Alberto. Who is voting for fascists, and what role do white women have in propping them up?
Alberto Toscano:Wow. There's a lot of people who've worked on and written for a long time on the role of women in new right movements in in the United States, a famous book called Suburban Warriors. And then there's all sorts of famous, figures that have gotten attention in that history of the US right. It's not something I do, like, empirical research on, so I wouldn't want to, make any kinda grand statements in that direction. But I think I think the question of gender and reproduction obviously has been at the core of fascist and far right movements for a long time.
Alberto Toscano:And as I said, these questions about natality and birth, threats to the family, coded in both gendered and racial terms, were very much at the core of the ideology and the appeal of fascism in the twenties thirties. Right? And at that level, it's it's kind of staggering how much continuity there is. And, you know, this obsession, like, it came up, you know, in these grotesque ways recently via JD Vance. Right?
Alberto Toscano:But this obsession, like, with childlessness, right, with the socially disruptive, aspects of of childlessness. And, of course, the formative function that transphobia and homophobia have, right, for far right politics. And, again, that's that's nothing new. One of the things that I think is significant about this is the way in which questions of gender and the disturbances to the order of gender and order of the family allow for the far right a very effective and for some very compelling link between the most intimate dimension of people's existence and livelihood and so on and these grand, like, historical or planetary issues. Right?
Alberto Toscano:So it's as if the sense of crisis, loss, impending catastrophe, and so on is projected onto the bodily level. Right? And that's a very, I think, compelling case or very effective. Right? Because it plays on the centrality of privatized and kind of personal security and as a word sovereignty to what is already a kind of common sense ideology.
Alberto Toscano:Right? You know, your home is your castle, etcetera, etcetera. What's interesting about it, of course, is that the supposed defense of the rights of the family and the parent and the household against this intrusive state turns out, unsurprisingly, right, to be something that makes it possible for states to directly monitor the biological and reproductive abilities and behaviors of individuals. Right? They go back to JD Vance, it was a recent piece about the fact that he was amongst the very few congressmen that voted and I forget the legislation but voted against this legislation which would have prohibited states from having access to the gynecological records of women.
Alberto Toscano:And the whole issue behind that is is basically what, you know, to use what is a truly dystopian term, what people have called menstrual policing. Right? Like, the fact that in the states that are trying to pass laws forbidding women from going for out of state abortions, that somehow the police or the sheriffs or whatever would be able to access medical records and prohibit people from moving out of state. Right? So you have this extremely dystopian situation in which on the one hand, the question of gender and gender norms, etcetera, is being presented as the effort of, you know, conserving the traditional classic heterosexual family against the incursion of this, you know, evil woke state and so on and so forth.
Alberto Toscano:But the reality of it is creating the infrastructure for a level of invasiveness into people's, sexual and reproductive lives is just kind of unparalleled. In fact, I really can't think of any other policy in the world, including very repressive ones, that has presented this as a kind of possibility. Right? So I think that's really striking now. Why does that, why and how does that enlist the support of large numbers of women in certain states or among certain groups is very difficult for me to really say.
Emily Williams:Well and I think I can't listen to you talk about this without thinking about patriarchy. Right? Like, everything that you're saying gets me back to this notion of that bell hooks put forward, which is white supremacist, heteropatriarchy. Mhmm. Right?
Emily Williams:This notion that property gets passed down through the male lineage. A woman takes a male's last name, has children. Her children are heirs to the white male patriarch. So I think it also is about going back to this notion of what you said earlier about this nation state, which is propped up by white men. Mhmm.
Emily Williams:And they have this privilege, this unparalleled privilege, this unchallenged privilege that more recently they're trying to say has been threatened, been threatened by people who are stepping outside of the gender binary, people who are no longer engaging in the institution of marriage, people who are defining spirituality for themselves, no longer traditional religion or more so leaning towards their own forms of spirituality. And so I think that that's an important frame for us to think about too, you know, how white supremacy and patriarchy and heterosexism all converge. And particularly, I think in this movement of the Tradwise Movement, where women are staying at home, they're cooking everything from scratch, and their purpose and vocation in the world is to serve their husbands and their children. You know, some of the more popular trad wives on social media have recently been uncovered for having, you know, lots of help within their home, having been married to bill husbands who come from billionaire families, for example. So it's so interesting.
Emily Williams:And perhaps I think this also goes back to what you were saying about the ability of the right to really play the long game because the trad wives in particular, especially the way that they show up on social media, if you're just scrolling, one would think this has nothing to do with politics. Let me figure out how to bake a blueberry pie from scratch. Right? I mean, that's what one would think if you just watch these videos. But when we get deeper into these conversations about what fascist movements rely upon, sort of that political imaginary and the roles that women need to play in order to uphold this white supremacist patriarchy, then it starts to make more sense.
Alberto Toscano:Yeah. And I think it also reminds us how much these, traditions or identities that fascisms depend on are absurdly artificial in the first place. Right? Our inventions of tradition. And in this case, it's even more telling that, you know, this is the broadcasting and the monetizing of a supposedly traditional domestic activity, which, of course, were it traditional or domestic, would not be an object of spectacle and communication on a highly monetized big tech platform.
Alberto Toscano:Right? So the whole idea is is just kinda laughable in the first place. But yeah.
Emily Williams:Mhmm. And now the Heritage Foundation, which is a very conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation and other organizations like them have been pushing this notion of project 2025 and other initiatives like it, very conservative approaches to policies that would affect our day to day life in America. So tell us, Alberto, how does life change for us if the Heritage Foundation and all of the players necessary to accomplish project 2025 are successful?
Alberto Toscano:So with the proviso that, I have not waited through the
Emily Williams:It's like 700 it's like 700 pages. Yeah.
Alberto Toscano:Or more. So I have, for the time being, only read long investigative articles about it, but now perused it for my own sake. One thing that I think is useful to frame this question is to really think about what the strategy of the far right that has structured itself and has been empowered especially through these foundations, right, which I think play a role in the United States that is not really comparable to other context necessarily, right, in terms of foundations that are writing legislation for congresspeople at both the state and federal level and that are advancing all these forms of lawfare and so on and so forth. I think the sheer amount of money and resources and strategic coordination that is now made visible by something like project 2025 is pretty staggering. Right?
Alberto Toscano:And I think as was made evident in the repeal of Roe, I think the ability of the far right in the United States to play a very long game and to play it very successfully is one of its more frightening dimensions. Right? That's the sense in which I think also we should always qualify the obsessive focus on the grotesque figure of Trump and now his the grotesque Robin to his Batman, JD Vance, or whatever. Is that in in some sense, that is what's leading or crowning this kind of project, but it's also a kind of diversionary tactic. Because as we watch the comedy shows about his ridiculous obsession with the windmills or whatever, like, there's a lot of extremely rational and extremely systematic and well funded and legally precise efforts to overturn social rights at every single level in every single jurisdiction in the US.
Alberto Toscano:The amount of states that have passed extremely draconian legislation, legislation that is extremely repressive of social rights, of social justice, and of social freedoms, whether it be on school curricula, whether it be on reproductive rights, whether it be on the rights to protest. I'm thinking of the things that, at least, they try to pass in Florida, which is basically, you know, making it legal to run over protesters or whatever. In many ways, what is being planned or what is being presented as the transition to some US form of electoral despotism or electoral authoritarianism or whatever you wanna call it is already at work. And I think, to my mind, the critical discourse has been insufficient attention to what is already happening at all of these county and state levels so that there's there's so much in the reality of so many places in the United States that is already extremely dystopian. Right?
Alberto Toscano:And things that have been going on for for a long while. Right? So that's not to say that the scale change isn't a massive issue. Like, of course, it's very different if there's somewhere else to go to, right, even within the boundaries of the United States than if what is now already the case in places like Missouri where, for instance, I believe they passed legislation making it basically impossible to divorce whilst pregnant. You know, all sorts of things like that are already on the books.
Alberto Toscano:Right?
Emily Williams:Well, and I think that's a really good point. You know, it's like now the 10 commandments have to be displayed in every classroom in Louisiana. You know, it's against the law to protest in North Carolina, Mississippi, and I believe Arkansas. It's either Arkansas or Alabama. And we we've already seen what's happened with the rollback of Roe v Wade, where physicians can be locked up if they provide an abortion to a person who needs it.
Emily Williams:So I think you're right in that we can expect to see much more of those kinds of policies passed much more widely and then even more than that.
Alberto Toscano:To touch on that, one of the things that I remember being really struck reading Du Bois' Reflections on Fascism and Black Reconstruction was precisely the insight that in the United States, especially after this counterrevolution against, like, the democratic moment of the 18 sixties to 18 eighties. Right? That there's an ability that the United States has had to basically have a regional or local enclaves of, like, full on fascistic politics. You know, that's a whole history of Jim Crow in any way. I mean, like, the US the US has had fascism.
Alberto Toscano:Right? Like, in fact, the life of black people under Jim Crow in the South was, like, far worse in terms of curtailing of liberties and rights than anything that the majority of the Italian population suffered under fascism. Right?
Emily Williams:Mhmm.
Alberto Toscano:And so I think the fact that that comp you know, the the the kind of the compromise, right, of the 18 seventies and 8 that allowed racial domination to continue in the South in order to allow capital accumulation to continue untrammeled in the whole country, I think that is such a deep structure that the ability that the United States has to create these pockets, but sometimes these pockets are very large states, and these states are growing in number, of extreme unfreedom while still appearing to the outside world, right, as this, you know, beacon of cultural and other, and other liberties is pretty staggering. Right? And I think because that was never broken, you know, that kind of states' rights history of of racism and domination was never broken. It's always remained. You can see it.
Alberto Toscano:Like, it's always remained a kind of legal and constitutional possibility. And in many ways, so much of what has been advanced by the far right, including by Heritage Foundation and other similar outfits, has really just been exploiting those legal potentials. Right? We're not talking about, like, illegitimately taking over power, tanks in the streets, or a coup d'etat. Right?
Alberto Toscano:You know, it's law fair. It's by the book. Right? And and those possibilities are available in the United States in a way that they wouldn't be, let's say, in countries that have very different constitutional arrangements, even like France or Italy, etcetera. Right?
Alberto Toscano:Mhmm. And I think that is really significant to keep in mind. And that's where, you know, the role of the judiciary, the supreme court, the state legislatures, etcetera, in really advancing and already making real so much of project 25 in the everyday life of people in the United States. I think that's very frightening and to only think of, like, even if Trump loses in November and whatever happens, vis a vis that, it's not like any of that's gone away. Right?
Emily Williams:I'm Emily Williams. Welcome back to Beyond Voting. Our guest today is critical theorist and author of late fascism, race, capitalism, and the politics of crisis, Alberto Toscano. Before the break, Alberto was explaining how lawfare essentially waging political war against an ideological opponent using legislation and law enforcement has historically been an effective tool in the spread of fascism. I wanted to hear more about how our political parties use law fair today and how anti fascist activists are fighting back.
Emily Williams:You know, the creep of fascism isn't just in the domain of right or Republicans. Right? I mean, we can see the way that pro Palestinian responses were responded to by Biden and Democratic mayors.
Alberto Toscano:Oh, yeah. Eric Adams, governor Hochul in in New York.
Emily Williams:Exactly. Exactly.
Alberto Toscano:Mass mandates.
Emily Williams:Exactly. Exactly. And even responses to cop city in Atlanta. So what do you say to people who look at democratic leaders' responses to pro Palestinian campus protests, or they hear our democratic president describe himself as a Zionist, and then they come away with this belief that there actually is no difference between our political parties.
Alberto Toscano:Well, that many ways, that's true, you know, or at least for large chunks of the Democratic Party establishment. Half the representatives didn't turn up for that bizarre North Korea style adulation of Benjamin Netanyahu in congress with the 58 standing ovation, etcetera. But half did. Right? And that half, I think, is, you know, largely indistinguishable on those issues, perhaps not on others.
Alberto Toscano:Right? I think that the way in which the protest and in which the whole question of the resistance to the genocide in Palestine has been dealt with has objectively served as this point of convergence, right, between these supposedly polarized groups. We spent years now where the idea is that America is this, you know, fully polarized political system where Democrats will have nothing to do with the Republicans or Republicans will have nothing to do with the Democrats. But, you know, when it comes to the kind of APAC territory of, you know, people who are being, you know, funded by on both camps, there's a massive amount of convergence. Right?
Alberto Toscano:And in many ways, not just a willingness, but a kind of relish, right, in employing extreme and, like, just shockingly disproportionate forms of repression against free speech and assembly. Right? And the realization that it can't be treated as a kind of secondary issue has, I think, in many ways, redrawn for many, at least, the political map. I mean, Biden tried to pass a obscenely draconian border bill, which was, like, far more draconian than what some previous Republican president sort of passed. And the only reason he didn't is because the Republicans are trying to play for a greater advantage and didn't want to give him something to campaign about.
Alberto Toscano:Right? So when centrist Democrat politicians tell you, you know, this country is at risk of fascism and yet are happy to give more powers to ICE, give more missiles to Netanyahu, put more poor black and brown people in jail, then you start wondering exactly how restrictive is their conception. You know, like, what exactly does it mean for them to say democracy is under threat? And I did I really did think the Netanyahu speech in Congress was really it was a momentous and shocking, not surprising, but kind of shocking performance. Right?
Alberto Toscano:Because it's not only, a, that he's been welcomed incidentally invited by Democrats as well as Republicans. Right? Because that invitation was signed by both Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer as well as Mike Johnson, I believe. But that he was in the middle of what all serious international bodies have decreed to be a genocide in progress. He's been welcomed and affected in a really hyperbolic way.
Alberto Toscano:Right? I mean, standing with Asia is like you might have seen it like a 19 fifties Soviet party congress, but not in many other places. And where he himself, of course, got one of his biggest applauses for defaming student and other protesters. Right? Incidentally, while 2 thirds of Americans are fairly, you know, firmly objecting to the continued US, support of genocide in Gaza.
Alberto Toscano:Right? And I think in that context, again, it forces us to qualify this idea of a kind of exceptional or or bearant or pathological, fascism against which we would then defend liberal democracy. Right? So I think things are, to me at least, appear much messier than that.
Emily Williams:So if it's true that, at least on the issue of Israel and Palestine, that the Republicans and Democrats are effectively the same. What do we as voters and activists do about that electorally? I mean, what does that mean for our options?
Alberto Toscano:Yeah. Again, as a non US citizen, I don't know to what extent I should be making, directly electoral comments. I think, you know, these things are very contextual and tactical and also involve a realistic calculus of, you know, where does one put one's pressure and to what end. I think what's most important probably is generating the most pressure at scale possible. Right?
Alberto Toscano:So whether it's through unions or through mass demonstrations. I I think making it very clear that there isn't some sort of lesser evil progressive vote that can just be taken for granted. You know, the way in which the US political system is organized, it always sort of subalternizes any progressive left into this position of either sitting out from electoral contests or holding its nose and voting for the center even though it doesn't really have much say in what follows. Right? That's also the particularly grim situation now, is that you're not faced on the other side by just some kind of generic you know, like, if not that one should be nostalgic about any of this, but, you know, if they were running, let's say, against Jeb Bush.
Alberto Toscano:Right? Then I think vast amounts of people would just sit it out. And I think, you know, that that's the issue. It's a different situation, but it's not underestimating the importance, right, of of federal politics and presidential politics and appointments to the supreme court. The threat always seems to be the election of this grotesque wannabe despot, but not everything else that's happening already.
Alberto Toscano:That has already moved, shifted the ground under you into a position where you're much weaker. Right? So I think, in many ways, the real antifascist activism hasn't been, you know, people trying to get more people to vote against Trump or whatever. It has been people engaging in resistance against anti migrant politics, has been abolitionists working on questions of prison and incarceration, has been real progressive labor and union organizing. It's that that creates an actual resistance.
Alberto Toscano:And then if on the basis of that, you can also try to make sure that the most toxic figures around don't get elected to enact these reactionary and also reactionary and ruling class projects, then that's great. But I think disjoining the 2 and that's what the sort of faux anti fascism that comes with a certain liberal mentality does. Right? That everything is ultimately fine. We just need to make sure every 4 years not to elect a fascist.
Alberto Toscano:Right? And I think that such an ultimately damaging perspective because it doesn't try to reflect on or counter why those politics might be attractive to certain people.
Emily Williams:Right. Including the liberal democrats.
Alberto Toscano:Including the liberal democrats. Right?
Emily Williams:I wanna highlight some things that you said. If a Democrat was running against Jeb Bush, maybe people could just sit out, and it wouldn't be as dire of a situation as we could be facing in this election. And then you also said that people need to think about, like, what are the conditions then that we would be living under but also organizing under. Right? And that we can't just, every 4 years, find ourselves upon and think, okay.
Emily Williams:Well, with my one vote, I'm gonna make the difference here.
Alberto Toscano:Yeah.
Emily Williams:We have to organize always. Right? We actually cannot stop organizing.
Alberto Toscano:Yeah. Also because of this weird situation in the United States where people are already told before the election happens that in, like, 41 states, it basically doesn't matter where you vote because it's kind of roughly already going in one direction.
Emily Williams:Right. With the electoral college. Right. Exactly. Exactly.
Emily Williams:But we have to be organizing at the local level, and we have to be organizing at the state level because that's so often where some of these more draconian policies get their momentum. We're gonna move into, like, what can we do today? And then hopefully another time, I can ask you about Trump's relationship with Putin and Kim Jong Un and, like, what that means for us because I wanna talk about that. But for the sake of this episode, tell us, what does being anti fascist look like, and what are the actual ways to resist fascism today?
Alberto Toscano:It's a very, it's a very tall order to answer that question. I think one way of approaching is to think that maybe you're not necessarily going to find antifascist politics by looking at politics that calls itself antifascist. My conviction, at least as far as, United States goes, is that abolitionist politics broadly construed, focusing on the prison industrial complex, focusing on policing, focusing on the extremely repressive racialized class and gendered aspects of that juridical and repressive apparatus and also forms of abolitionist politics that are oriented to countering the persecution of migrants in the United States and all of those activities, both at a very local, often largely invisible level or at kind of higher scales, have to be thought of as a kind of the grassroots or the or or the fundamental components, right, of an antifascist politics. And and why is that? I think because as we see very clearly, right, in the discourse that was coming out, for instance, of the Republican National Convention, much of what contemporary fascistic politics involves is an effort to intensify, to celebrate, and really to politicize the forms of social and legal repression that already exist.
Alberto Toscano:Right? So to give more powers, more impunity, and to generate more violence by the state against vulnerable or stigmatized or marginalized people, to intervene in and interfere with the reproductive lives of, women and others. Everything that's being presented actually by the contemporary far right can principally be seen, right, as this kind of intensification and politicization of the repressive state apparatus, right, towards this project of nationalist rebirth. And that's why I think to center in our own critiques, but also in our own activism, what they themselves have centered in their own program. Right?
Alberto Toscano:But I do think that that's where one has to look at those infrastructures of activism and also of intellectual and political mobilization as a starting point. Right? Instead of doing it the other way around, which is, like, here's Trump and his, you know, gang of reactionaries. Like, how do we stop them? And then work backwards from there.
Emily Williams:Can you say more about that? Like, what does building and creating that politic in those institutions, what does that do for us by not simply reacting to the policies of the far right, but really being proactive in preventing them from implementing fascistic policies? What does that do for us?
Alberto Toscano:There was this nice phrase by the German philosopher, Walter Benjamin, where he talked about making something useless for fascism. Right? That that is also, like, an antifascist politics. I think the idea of a purely responsive or reactive antifascism that is about stopping something without building anything else is deeply limiting and also forces progressive and social justice and and left groups into simply being a kind of, you know, water carrier for liberalism. Because the liberal perspective in fascism is ultimately like, well, you know, our rule of law is fine.
Alberto Toscano:Our capitalist system can just be tweaked here and there. And ultimately, we just need to make sure these people don't get the levers of power. Right? But the levers are fine, you know, and the power is okay. And then if that's how things are framed, then it's just about mobilizing people to the ballot box every 2 or 4 years in the crisis.
Alberto Toscano:Right? So I thought one interesting thing also to learn from is the most recent French election, right, where Marine Le Pen's, Ursula Le Mans Nationale, the the far right nationalist party, was seen as as likely to win a parliamentary majority and therefore to be able to demand to form a government or to have the prime ministership. Multiple parties on the left from very, very moderate left to, you know, like a serious, principled left formed this kind of popular front. But they did so on a program that was, like, a genuinely socially progressive program. Right?
Alberto Toscano:That wasn't just about vote for us so you don't have this kind of nationalist and racist party in power. It was a very, solid position around Palestine. It was lowering the pension age. It was increasing social rights, etcetera. Right?
Alberto Toscano:So there was a substance. There was a vision of a different way of collectively organizing social life that would then empower people to reject the rule of the far right rather than simply, you know, kind of crying wolf and then saying, oh, you know, we all have to just make sure we go to the polls, and then, you know, the next day, we can just let whoever governs, governs. Right? And therefore, exacerbating the conditions for far right politics next time around.
Emily Williams:And I think that this is such an important point, especially for social justice activists, because having that vision of a socially just world becomes incredibly important because that's actually the thing that we can all rally around. It's so important to do the work to become an anti racist society, to root out transphobia, to address sexism. Right? Because if we don't address those things, then they can just be exacerbated by a fascist movement. Right?
Emily Williams:Because a large part of why so many on the far right are attacking DEI, are attacking women's rights, are attacking the right for gender affirming care because we've become empowered in these ways. Right? We've had really strong movements to get us to advance our rights in these areas, But we need that expansive vision for social justice in our society to move in that direction and to get the collective power to support those visions. So now you sometimes hear leftists online engaging in, like, a type of doomerism.
Alberto Toscano:Mhmm.
Emily Williams:K? This notion that the empire is crumbling. Just let it crumble. Right? And we'll start over from there.
Emily Williams:Or you'll see people online saying that if Trump wins, he'll just leave the country and go somewhere else. What do you make of those arguments? And can you talk about the idea that it's possible to flee the reach of an empire?
Alberto Toscano:Yeah. I think the catastrophism, which is weirdly optimistic about its pessimism, has, infamously not a very happy history on the left. I think part of the issue, in a way, also why that imaginary is is problematic, is because I think we have almost a kind of tidy and maybe cinematic way of of thinking about social catastrophe. We're, I think, not ready to accept that things can get a lot worse without necessarily there being some tidy, clean break that puts us in a different situation. Right?
Alberto Toscano:Like, that that there will be, like, the day in which American fascism has begun. Right? Of course, the country already had 4 years of Trump, not insignificant to recall. And even if, obviously, there seems to be something much more concerted about project 2025, etcetera, there are still all sorts of inbuilt inertias and complexities to the place, which means that things could get terrible, but also terrible within the bounds of what people certain people find ways to cope with. Other people will suffer terrible violence, which other people will ignore, and so on and so forth.
Alberto Toscano:And that's why affixing, again, the question of fascism just to Trump and to the presidency is a real problem. Right? Because you can also have a situation in which, again, Trump loses, but those mechanisms that have already been happening at the state level, etcetera, get worse and worse and worse. And so, yeah, you have Kamala Harris as president, but, ultimately, states that are repressive, racial, patriarchal realities that make life impossible for people. You can have a situation where Trump could become president.
Alberto Toscano:Instead of deporting 20,000,000 people, he might deport 10. And, unfortunately, people are able to live with really staggering levels of social injustice and horror. So I think it that one of the big dangers is to think again in this binary kind of norm. That's why I still think that there's something very important about the optic that Angela Davis proposed in the 19 seventies when, you know, she was talking about what she called incipient fascism, and she was also making it very clear as many black radical and migrant and people of color activists have put forward that, you know, fascism is something that is differentially experienced, that people in different gendered and class and racialized and and kind of situations of documentation experience both the violence of the state, but also the violence of parastate actors, militias, gangs, etcetera, in in really dissimilar ways. Right?
Alberto Toscano:And so we already live across the world, right, in societies where areas of seeming affluence and liberty and ease sit side by side of overlapping with areas of remarkable domination and social violence and so on. Again, that's why I I think there's something so powerful about the abolitionist lens and thinking through anti fascism. You know, what does it mean to think, oh, you know, our society is living under this fascist threat if we think about, as Davis had already put in the seventies, the fact that large sways of citizens or inhabitants of this space already live under forms of racial terror and domination. Right? And that domination is not homogeneous, is not generalized.
Alberto Toscano:In fact, it reproduces itself because it's partial and differential and so on, but it's there. Right? And we have to start from there to think about how we resist and fight against a further worsening of that situation rather than to present the situation we're in as one of kind of Pacific liberal democracy, right, that is being threatened from outside, right, from some from some exceptional space by these aberrant forces. No. The forces are already there.
Alberto Toscano:They're already running. Right? Like, prisons are already, like, in the police. You know? And that's why it's possible.
Alberto Toscano:Right? It's possible because it's already here. And there are thresholds that matter. Right? And the presidency is one of them.
Alberto Toscano:And then all sorts of other thresholds that are laws that are passed or not passed. You know, all of those are different points of a struggle and conflict for social justice campaigns and so on. But I think we really need to get away from that sense of the exceptional transformation. Right?
Emily Williams:Yeah. And thank you for that. Because one of the things that I've also seen going around social media that I've heard from people who live in countries where there is extreme social violence and there is a fascist or an authoritarian or a dictator in power is that you think that you know when it will be time to leave or time to go and when you realize that it is always too late. Right? That's one thing that I have heard repeatedly, people who have left Lithuania, who have left Zimbabwe, who have left Ethiopia.
Emily Williams:And then I think also to your point, the level of social violence, I think, is something that most Americans are not prepared for, and they're also not prepared to see the kind of perhaps willful ignorance or, as you said, just the ability for people to live with extreme social injustice.
Alberto Toscano:Mhmm.
Emily Williams:And I think that we've seen that play out over the last 5 to 10 years. We've been living with an extreme level of social injustice. I mean, that's one thing that's, I think, part of the fabric of society in this country.
Alberto Toscano:I think how we lived through, to put it problematic ways, the pandemic. Right? Yeah. In terms of what can be tolerated, right, or accepted.
Emily Williams:Exactly. Exactly. So now you've mentioned Angela Davis multiple times, like W. E. B.
Emily Williams:Du Bois, which I so appreciate and I know our listeners love. What can past movements, particularly black radical traditions, teach us about how to confront today's threat? If black movements have historically had something to teach us, how do we support black movements today?
Alberto Toscano:So you mentioned my, deep indebtedness to critiques of fascism emerging from black radical and liberation thinkers like Du Bois and Angela Davis, George Jackson, and and others. And one of the things that is distinctive about their perspectives, at least to my mind, was that in many ways, they didn't treat that electoral dimension as primary. It's not that they disregarded it. Indeed, Angela Davis ran for national office for the Communist Party of the United States. But they wanted to take a step back and really understand why the societal and material preconditions, this kind of long gestation, right, of fascism within society itself.
Alberto Toscano:One of the dimensions of black radicalism that I think is really underscored in Cedric Robinson's work, for instance, is what does it mean to think of the resistance to fascism not simply as a negation, right, not simply as the anti, not simply as the we're not x. Right? And one of the dimensions of Robinson's idea of a black radical tradition as such in in black Marxism and other texts was precisely to focus on the notion of there being a political culture, perspective, forms of life that built themselves autonomously and, in a sense, created an alternative to or a point from which to struggle against these systems of racial and capitalist domination. Right? So I think one of the things that perspective suggests, or joins us to kind of think about and learn is, you know, what does it mean to make movements that are not just the inverted mirror image or not just simply built to fight this awful conjuries of forces.
Alberto Toscano:Right? But that also have their own desires and their own worlds and lives that they want to make and foster and shelter and reproduce and so on and so forth. I mean, I think both Angela Davis and even George Jackson say this at some point or other. But, you know, if you think in the early seventies of the Black Panther so called survival programs, right, the survival pending revolution, as a word, the breakfast programs, sickle cell anemia screening, and so on and so forth. That was as much as or more so a kind of politics of resisting the fascism, the racial fascism they recognize within the US policy as following the police on patrol, as knowing the law books so that you could counter them on that footing.
Alberto Toscano:And so in some sense, an antifascist politics is also very much about centering very different forms of collectivity and social production. And I think that the attention of a black radical tradition in the United States for very specific historical reasons having to do with a history of slavery and reconstruction and Jim Crow and so on is also there's been a long tradition also of various forms of of autonomy, right, of of trying to in this hostile environment in response to these forms of racial terror also to think of, you know, what are forms of community and autonomy and self, you know, social reproduction that that don't require necessarily the state. And I think that's a that's a really important set of resources and histories and habits to turn to when often antifascism is presented to us simply as a punctual political polemical response to what the right is doing, right, without necessarily focusing on what kind of world are we trying to make. Those social justice initiatives that are grounded on conceptions of collective autonomy and control over all sorts of aspects of social reproduction and really direct forms of grassroots democracy, etcetera, that I think need to be very much fostered now.
Emily Williams:Yeah. What is the world that we're building, and how are we caring for each other and making this society more livable for more people as part of the resistance? Sure. The DEI is working, but more importantly, our movements for justice have been working, right, for racial justice, for gender justice. These things are what we need to do more of if we actually are going to build a society that is resistant to fascism.
Emily Williams:I know so many of the young activists in our community at the Arcis Center For Social Justice Leadership, they look to Angela Davis, they look to the Black Panther Party, and what I hear you saying is do more of that and build it for today. Right?
Alberto Toscano:It's a good note to end off. Do more of that.
Emily Williams:Alberto Toscano, thank you so much. This has been a wonderful conversation and a much needed conversation.
Alberto Toscano:It's been a pleasure, Emily.
Emily Williams:Thank you. I have to say, talking with Alberto was jarring. Going into our interview, I expected to hear him talk about the threat of growing fascism. And I knew that draconian laws limiting the rights to public assembly, bodily autonomy, and free speech were being weaponized by politicians across the country, but I still went in expecting to hear mostly about what greater threats could potentially come if fascism were to manifest in this country like it has in others. But like many others out there, I hadn't fully confronted or accepted as reality that many of the signs of fascism are already here, and they have been for a very long time.
Emily Williams:As Alberto said, black radical thinkers from Angela Davis to Du Bois have pointed at the racial fascism that has dominated the majority of American history. The clearest example being the post reconstruction black codes and their eventual evolution into Jim Crow. That is American fascism. And whether or not an obvious fascist is elected into office, that doesn't stop repressive political projects from being implemented. Furthermore, we have to recognize that there are political infrastructures in place at every level, including state and local, that make us deeply vulnerable to bad actors across the political spectrum, which ultimately leaves one feeling that American democracy is a lot more fragile than we think.
Emily Williams:We think that we'll know when it's time to fully resist fascism, but the truth of the matter is that we won't. It sneaks up on you. And while we wait, the quiet injustices continue to grow. 1st, it's scapegoating the migrants. Then it's vilifying protesters.
Emily Williams:Then taking away reproductive rights. The existing fissures in our systems continue to be exploited, and people feel more isolated and resigned to the status quo. So maybe you're saying to yourself, well, Emily, if things are already as dark and grim as you say, and fascism is already here, then what does it even matter if I vote? That kind of nihilistic thinking doesn't serve us. Acknowledging our reality shouldn't defeat us.
Emily Williams:It should activate us. Voting is a starting point, and it's important to weigh the issues, the candidates, and the courts when making the decision whether to vote or not. We'll talk more about the vital role the courts play in defending democracy next episode. But it's also our duty to redouble our efforts to root out fascism in our society in between elections. American civil rights activists created a movement that inspired social justice action from Cape Town to Belfast.
Emily Williams:And while equal access to the voting booth was a huge aspect of that movement, it was never only about securing the right to vote and then stopping there thinking that the work was done. And that's why cultivating the political imaginary that Alberto talked about is so crucial. The civil rights movement wasn't just about fighting back against the racial terror and injustice people were living under. It imagined a new way of life for Black Americans that was much more expansive, joyful and truly empowered than it had ever been before. But they didn't just stop at imagining it.
Emily Williams:They marched. They organized. They ran for office. They built voter education and survival programs to care for their communities. That improved the lives of not just Black Americans, but all Americans.
Emily Williams:And that's a big part of what's missing from our politics today. Now our politics feel self segregated whether by identity or by issue and self righteously so. But we need to treat all marginalized people's fights as our own with a unifying movement centered around collective care for our fellow human beings regardless of identity or issue. And we need a candidate fully invested in fighting for that vision. That can be our reality.
Emily Williams:There is no perfect moment in the future where the pieces have all fallen into place and the path is suddenly visible. We have to make the road by walking. Now is the time to activate that vision, mobilize and work together to create the world we all deserve. So tell us, what ideas and principles make up your political imaginary? Do you see any opportunities for resistance in your day to day life?
Emily Williams:Tell us on IG at arcuscenter or drop it in your 5 star review of the show. Many thanks again to Alberto Toscano for leading us through such an important and timely conversation. If you liked today's show, let us know. Share the episode with your friends and family, and please visit us at arcuscenter.kzoo.edu Thanks again for joining us on Beyond Voting.
Emily Williams:See you next time. Beyond Voting is hosted by me, Emily Williams. Keisha TK Dutas is our executive producer. Kristen Bennett is our producer. And this episode was written by Kristen Bennett and me.
Emily Williams:Our sound designer and engineer is Manny Faces. Marketing is courtesy of Faybeon Mickens, and our music is provided by Motion Array. Special thanks to my team at the Arcus Center For Social Justice Leadership, Quentin, Crimson, Tamara, Winter, and Kierra. Beyond voting is a production of Philo's Future Media.