Knock knock, I’m coming in.  So I just- Oh for God’s sake…

            Ugh, stop talking so loudly.  What do you want from me?  Why are you waking up me so early?

It’s 2PM.  Anyways, I’m here because you were supposed to have another essay on my desk last week.  Where’s the content, Lebowski?

            Well pardon me for not being at my most productive during a global pandemic.

I suspect your lack of productivity is more due to the sheer quantity of alcohol you’re consuming.

            Same difference.  Plus, I finished yesterday, just had to let the idea percolate a bit is all.

In your case, less like percolating and more like pickling.  What’re you writing about this time?

            The title is Charli XCX: An Exploration of Freud and the Erotic of the De-sexualized.  It’s about-

No.  No no no.  You are not writing another essay about some wistful female Gen Z popstar.

            Fine, killjoy.  Well, I’d been thinking about this for a later essay, $uicideboy$: An Exploration into Sad Boi Rap Culture and its Sociological Implications.

Way too niche.  Plus, I can already tell where you’re going with it; something like “The Sad Boi is a subversion of the Stereotypical Rapper, etc, etc”.  Try again.

            What do you want from me, huh?  The subjects have always been niche!

Exactly, that’s why you haven’t expanded your audience.  You need to write about something that’s going to grab the reader’s attention.  Something that gets us clicks!

            I’m not going to choose clickbait-y subjects just to increase reach.  That’ll kill us long-term.

You have to make it short-term first to make it long-term later.  And I’m not asking you to do clickbait, just choose something interesting.  That’s just basic marketing.

            Well, I hate it.  Marketing logic is how you avoid having to say anything of substance.  It’s why Trump got all that free airtime in 2016, not because he ever has anything worthwhile to say.  Do you remember how long “Covfefe” stayed in the news cycle?  Months!

… You’re a genius!

            I’m glad you finally appreciate my talents.  But, uh, why are you saying that?

Trump!  You’ve gotta talk about Trump!  It’s perfect, think pieces on Trump get huge traffic.  Didn’t you take that class with that professor who keeps getting interviewed about Trump and Trumpism?

            Are you talking about Enzo Traverso?  Yeah, I took a few courses of his in undergrad.

And he released that book too, right?  That one he was workshopping while you were taking his classes?  Oh this couldn’t be more perfect!

            Weren’t you the warned me in the last essay about getting too overtly political?

I wasn’t saying that.  I was just saying rambling about the minutia of Leftism isn’t going to attract readers.  Trump, on the other hand, is someone everyone is affected by and has an opinion on.  That gets readers.

            I don’t know…

Come on, I know you could come up with something clever!  Tell you what, even though I think it’s a bit funky, I’ll even let you throw in a little Lacanian psychoanalytic babble!

            Fine, I’ll do it.  Hmm…

Alright, lay it on me, I’m excited to actually have something marketable!  Come on, make it bold, make it brash!  Make it bold and brash!

            With the global far-right ascendant since the early 2010s, the question of who (and what) is fascist is once again in the public discourse.  Particularly, there is great interest in whether the American president, Donald Trump, is a fascist.  In this essay, I’ll make the case that Donald Trump is a postfascist or operating in a postfascist manner.  Additionally, I will discuss what I view as a potential danger that would allow Trump and Trump-like leaders to transition to a more traditional fascist politics.  Finally, I will make the case that current political trends and discourse reveal a deep societal concern with the Lacanian hysterical question, a condition only exacerbated by the conditions of quarantine.  How this hysterical question is resolved will provide some insight into what the coming years are likely to hold.

Well then, let’s get started.  Why do you think Trump is a “postfascist”?  And what does that mean, exactly?

            Well, let’s start with the more immediate question; what is fascism?  It’s a word bandied around with such frequency it’s become a bit of a catch-all “thing bad” insult.  Conservatives?  Fascist.  Liberals?  Fascist.  Communists?  Also fascist.  Too many gay people in your video games?  Definitely fascist.  Being forced to wear a face mask during a global pandemic?  That’s a fascism.  And anti-fascists?  The height of fascism.

            This all being said, fascism does refer to a very particular ideology.  While academics did and continue to debate the most accurate definition of fascist, many find Roger Griffin’s definition in The Nature of Fascism helpful.  For Griffin, the various fascisms differ but all have at their core a mythos of “palingenetic ultranationalism”.  That is, for something to be fascist, it must at the very least have this palingenetic, ultranationalist core.

Palin-What?

         Palingenetic ultranationalism is a lot less complicated than it sounds.  Ultranationalism is straight-forward, it essentially describes an extreme concern with the nation, the nation as something (arguably, the only thing) of value.  Palingenetic essentially refers to the structure of the fascist political myth.  In the fascist political myth, the nation at one point was strong, paradisiacal and virulent, but something happened, either a cataclysmic event or a slow-but-steady decline into degeneracy.  But the good news, per the fascist myth, the nation can be revitalized and return to that pre-Fall state of the nation.  Through fascism, that is, you can …

I thought you said Trump wasn’t a fascist.  Plus, don’t you think you’re being a bit alarmist here?  As you said, the word “fascist” has some pretty heavy connotations.  Trump is, without a doubt, a bad dude, but it’s not like he’s got concentration-

You know what I mean.

            I do (though I’d probably push back on that), but let’s address your first point.  You’re right, I don’t believe Trump is a classical fascist, even if he arguably fits Griffin’s definition of the fascist minimum.  Critics have (rightly) pointed out that Griffin’s definition is pretty broad, including regimes such as Franco’s Spain and Pinochet’s Chile, which are not generally considered to be fascist by academics.

Franco and Pinochet weren’t fascists?  But they were absolutely brutal dictators!

            True, but remember, fascism isn’t just “thing bad”.  While all fascist regimes are necessarily violent, that doesn’t mean non-fascist regimes can’t be as or more brutal than them.  Franco, Pinochet, and a smattering of other regimes are more accurately described as falangist, which can be conceptualized as a sort of united front government between fascists and more traditional authoritarian elements.  Falangist and fascist goals also broadly overlap, so they’re often hard to tease apart.

You’re trying to clarify what you mean by fascist.  Stop throwing more complicated words at us like “falangist” which only serve to confuse us more.

            I swear this will help, just bear with me.  Traditional authoritarians (e.g. the kings and queens of old, military dictators, etc) rely on traditional institutions to legitimize themselves.  A European king claimed right to rule through the Divine Right of Kings, through their bloodline, and through their brute strength.  Note here that the traditional authoritarian legitimizes itself by appeals to outside institutions (the church, inheritance laws, might makes right, etc).

In a fascist regime, you have a bit of looped logic wherein the fascist regime legitimates itself through its own institutions.  Take the example of the Protestant churches in Nazi Germany.  When the Nazis (a clearly fascist regime) took power, they subverted many Protestant churches.  They pushed them to incorporate Nazi ideology and to support the Nazi state, something many of them did.  This synthesis, referred to by Nazis as Positive Christianity and taught in the (not creatively named) German Churches, then served to legitimate the Nazi state.

Sorry, I’m struggling to understand what you mean by that.

            Let’s try and break down the logic.

• The Nazi State (A) viewed the German Church (B) as legitimate (relationships of legitimation indicated by >).
  • A > B
• Because the German Church was viewed as legitimate by the Nazi state, the views of the German Church (B*) were legitimate.
  • If A > B, then B > B* 
  • A > B, therefore A > B*
• The German Church viewed the Nazi state as legitimate.
  • B* > A
• In summation:
  • A > B
  • B > B*
  • If A > B, then A > B*
  • A > B, therefore A > B*
  • A > B*
  • B* > A
  • If A > B* and B* > A, then A > A
  • A > B* and B* > A, therefore A > A
  • A > A

In this way, the Nazi state legitimated itself by appealing to an institution (the German Church) whose legitimacy only stood because it was legitimated by the Nazi state.  The same happened in other institutions, including but not limited to: the art world, the education system, the military, etc.

Okay, that makes a bit more sense.  But then how does falangism fit in?

            Falangism represents a sort of mid-point between traditional authoritarianism and fascism, relying on both outside and inside institutions to legitimize itself.  Take the case of Franco’s falangism (from which the term originates).  It was the result of a merger between a fascist wing and a more traditional, conservative Catholic wing (that ultimately dominated).  It relied both on outside institutions (notably the Catholic Church, regardless of whether the Vatican approved) and inside institutions (myths of Spanish rebirth) to legitimate itself.

            In actuality, there haven’t been any ‘pure’ fascist states.  Even Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy weren’t, as they relied on some outside legitimating institutions.  Mussolini was unable to subvert the Catholic Church or the monarchy while Nazi Germany had to rely on the pseudoscience of racial supremacy.  So when we say Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy were fascist, what we are really saying is that they relied overwhelmingly on internal institutions to legitimize themselves.

So, it’s like a spectrum?  Traditional authoritarianism on one end, fascism on the other, and falangism in the middle?

            Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Okay, then how does Trump play into this?

            Well, like I said, I don’t think he’s a fascist.  Again, this doesn’t mean I don’t realize how existentially dangerous he is, I simply don’t believe he’s a fascist.  The first and most non-controversial reason for this is pretty straightforward; I don’t believe he’s ideologically committed to fascism.  I don’t think Trump’s the kind of guy who goes to bed reading Revolt Against the Modern World or whatever else fascists try to pass off as theory.  Assuming he has an ideology at all, it appears more similar to Reaganite ideology where the bigotry and authoritarianism is more mask-off.  And to be totally honest, I think Trump does what Trump wants because he simply doesn’t have the capacity to hold a coherent ideology.

So you’re speculating?

            Well, yes, but you can never truly know what someone genuinely believes in their heart, even if they wrote a manifesto of their political beliefs.  But to a certain degree, I don’t really care what is deep within Trump’s heart; his decisions and their effects are what more concern me.  One’s actions can result in a movement towards fascism even if you aren’t a committed fascist yourself.  That is, you can do fascism without being a fascist.

And do his actions fit the bill?

            Yes, I do believe so.  Specifically, I think Trump is, wittingly or unwittingly, participating in the postfascist mode, a form of fascist politics that we see across much of the Western world today.

You just love to keep throwing new terms at us, postfascism?

            This one has a bit of a story behind it, so let me set the scene.  The day is November 8^th, 2016, Election Day in the USA.  I was enjoying an excellent bagel sandwich, as was my go-to for all-nighter snacks.  I was writing an essay on (ironically) the French Revolution while the election results rolled in.  We all knew what the results were going to be: Hillary Clinton, despite being unpopular, was going to win the election because Donald Trump was so deeply unpalatable.  The first few states to come in went to Trump, not surprising as they were heavy red states.  Then a bunch of states went Hillary, putting her ahead for a considerable portion of the evening.  But then, something happened.  Pennsylvania went Trump, that wasn’t supposed to happen.  Then Michigan, another swing state, went Trump.  And then Wisconsin.  And it was over, Donald Trump was president.  Immediately, my phone starts to go off.

            But it wasn’t just my friends and family reaching out to me, it was also my professors.  Every single one of my four classes the next day were cancelled.  That is, with the exception of Enzo Traverso’s class which had a non-mandatory discussion section.

Well, that’s all interesting, but we didn’t come here for your life-story.  What happened during the discussion?

            Enzo has a very particular way of speaking on account of English being his 4^th language (after Italian, German and French).  So we all sat down, Enzo arrived late (as usual) and said this: “Today we are going to discuss is this; is Donald Trump fascist or not?”

And let me guess, self-described communist Enzo said Trump was a fascist?

             Surprisingly, no!  He of course acknowledged Trump’s racism, sexism, and approval of political violence, all consistent with 20^th century fascism.  He even recognized how Trump’s rallies and presentational style were … a bit evocative, if unintentionally.

            But ultimately, he doesn’t really check some of the more important boxes.  Sure, Make America Great Again seems palingenetic, but Trump hasn’t really articulated what exactly that America looks like.  Or at least not to the extent that the Nazis explained the Tausendjähriges Reich or the Italian fascist goals of a New Rome.  Trump makes direct appeals to various religious institutions, especially Protestant churches, but they serve as an outside institution of legitimation.  The same with the military, Trump’s appeal to the military as an institution is less the aspirations of a coup d’état and more the legitimacy-seeking of “I’m with these guys”.

            While he’s weakened democratic norms, he doesn’t appear to want to install himself as leader for life.  It seems more like he wants to be a Bonapartist leader, a strong-man leader with the trappings of democracy.  And while there are militant groups like the Proud Boys that support him, Trump himself doesn’t have anything akin to the Blackshirts of fascist Italy.

            For these reasons and others, Enzo did not believe Trump is a classical fascist.  That said, he did recognize there was ‘something going on” with the Trumpist phenomena, and not just limited to the US.  Remember that only a couple years earlier was Brexit.  Next year, Marine Le Pen’s far-right Front National came close to winning the French election.  This period would see the rise of far-right figures from Poland, to the Philippines, to Hungary.  While the aforementioned groups did not identify explicitly as fascist, there was also the frightening rise of explicit Neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn in Greece.  Enzo analysed this trend over the next few years before publishing his book The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right.

Okay, and what did he say in that?

Enzo tagged many of these leaders and their parties, Trump, Le Pen, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, among others, as postfascists.  Enzo defines postfascism as a nascent movement picking up the pieces from fascism’s failure in the 20^th century.  Specifically, it is an attempt to redefine how fascism is done in the 21^st century, operating within neoliberal democracies.  This is as opposed to neofascism (like Golden Dawn) which tries to revive fascism (nearly) identically to how it was in the 20^th century.  Enzo ultimately argues that postfascism is deeply dangerous for its ability to create the conditions for a more traditional fascist politics to arise.

So how are they different? 

            This will be easier if I bulletpoint the major differences. 

• State power
  • The fascist will attempt to conquer state power directly.  While all fascist parties have used violence to some degree, conquering state power can be achieved through violence, shows of force, or by forcing the hand of democratic governments.  The fascist sees any aspect of state power not directly controlled by them as threatening.
  • The postfascist doesn’t necessarily seek to directly hold state power, but to be the most influential force therein.  To the postfascist, it doesn’t matter if they hold the reins of power directly, what matters is whether their ideas are exerting the greatest influence.  For example, while there are relatively fewer Trumpist Republicans than traditional conservative Republicans, it is the Trumpist faction that exerts the greatest influence on the Republican party.  The postfascist don’t have to run the police, military, etc, they just have to influence them enough that they start carrying out postfascist aims (whether they know it or not).
• The Out-group
  • The fascist out-group is pretty well-known: the Jews.  But it also include other groups such as queer people, Slavs, Roma, disabled people, etc.
  • The postfascist shares a lot of the fascist out-groups but engages in a particularly interesting form of co-option.  The postfascist will take emancipatory rhetoric and twist it towards a reactionary goal.  For example, many will masquerade their racism through support of queer and women’s rights, “I don’t believe we should let Mexicans into the country because they’re a danger to women and queer people”.  They don’t genuinely hold this position, of course, but recognize it as a helpful rhetorical bludgeon.

• Nation
  • The fascist is ultranationalist; the nation (in fascist understanding, some combination of a biological, racial and/or historical grouping) is the thing of greatest importance.  Revitalizing and maintaining the nation is the primary concern of the fascist.
  • The postfascist is more concerned with the national character.  That is, they are more concerned with maintaining the cultural practices associated with the nation rather than the nation itself.  Take the Lega Nord, for example, they are a postfascist party that argues for secession of Northern Italy.  This is because they see Northern Italy as productive (i.e. maintaining Italian national character), unlike the unproductive, degenerated Naples and Sicily.  This is despite Northern and Southern Italy ostensibly belonging to the same nation.

I get the first two, but why is the ‘concern with the national character’ part a bad thing?  What’s wrong with trying to maintain cultural characteristics they see as good?

            That’s a fair question and underlines why some find themselves unexpectedly in agreement with postfascists (and why they find success in neoliberal democracies).  While apparently un-offensive, the rub lies in what is left unsaid.  First off, who gets to define what is part of the national character?  For example, Germany was the birthplace of Marx and modern socialism.  It has one of the greatest traditions of democratic socialism in the world.  It’s also the birthplace of Max Stirner, important contributor to the anarchist tradition.  But of course, these aren’t the parts of the national character the postfascists want to promote/protect.  They will, however, turn right around and praise German productivity (an idea originating in Nazi propaganda) or myths about the Teutonic Knights as their origins.  Thus, what the postfascist deems ‘part of the national character’ belies their own beliefs and goals, not some fundamental cultural truth.

Additionally, the term ‘national character’ is an example of mystification, or misattribution.  For example, the Swedish postfascist may say “I want to preserve the Swedish national character because it has good qualities like respect for the elderly, mutual care and making fun of the Danish”.  And to be clear, it is always a good thing to make fun of the Danish.  But there’s nothing ‘essentially Swedish’ about any of these traits, so why do they attribute it to the Swedish national character?

Huh, I guess that is weird.

            Well, maybe not so ‘weird’ as it is revealing.  For this, let’s use Lacan’s idea of the Objet Petit a.  Lacan begins with the basic post-structuralist insight: words don’t have any positive meaning.

“Words don’t have meaning”, and yet somehow, I understand what you’re writing.  You’ve undermined your own point right at the outset.

         I said words don’t have positive meaning, that is, words are only defined by other words.  Take the word ‘pig’ for example, what is a pig?

Well, it’s a pink mammal with a snout and curly tail.

            Okay, what is ‘pink’?

… A colour that is the combination of red and white?

            Okay, what is ‘colour’?  ‘Combination’?  ‘A’?

What are you getting at?

            The point I’m trying to make is that every word is defined by other words.  A word is defined by the combination of words used to describe it.  And each of those descriptive words are themselves defined by another set of words, and so on and so forth.  Thus, a large web of words is created in which each word is defined by each other with no ‘positive meaning’, only negative meaning by juxtaposition to other words.

What if I pointed to a pig and said ‘pig’?  That would get over this problem of defining-words-through-words.

            Well, you’ll find yourself in the same problem.  Imagine I didn’t know what a pig was, so you point at the pig and say ‘pig’.  But there are many issues with this.  Does ‘pig’ mean pigs generally?  Or this pig?  Or does ‘pig’ refer to animals generally?  To its colour?  You’d have to clarify this to me, and to do that, you’d have to do so by pointing out how the word is used differently to other words.  Thus, you’d still be defining the word by its relation to other words.

But, you and I both clearly know what a pig is!

            True!  This is where Lacan’s Objet Petit a comes in; essentially an extension of the post-structuralist core that comes to a different conclusion.  Lacan agrees that words are defined by this web of associated words, this web of descriptors.  But, he believes that this web of descriptors actually ‘creates’ meaning greater than the words defining it would suggest.

That hurt my brain a bit.  The descriptors ‘create’ more meaning than they describe?  What does that mean?

            To make my point more clear, tell me what this is:

A pig?

            But this isn’t pink!  How could it be a pig if it isn’t pink?

Not all pigs are pink.

            What if I showed you a pig without a curly tail?  Or one without a snout?

Those would still be pigs, obviously.

            Okay, then what maketh ‘pig’?

Well, I guess you could use the biological definition, a pig is a particular kind of mammal.

            And ‘mammal’ is defined as an organism with nipples, hence ‘mammary’ gland.  What if I showed you a pig didn’t have nipples due to a mutation?  Or a pig that didn’t have the warm-blood of mammals?

Okay, I get your point; each word is defined by other words and if you keep going down the rabbit hole, you lose any sense of the word’s meaning.

            And this is where Lacan is helpful.  Objet Petit a refers to the essential quality of a particular word that exists beyond its descriptors.  Put differently, Objet Petit a is the positive meaning of a word that coagulates around the web of descriptors of that word.  In this case, Objet Petit a of pig is ‘pig-ness’, the essential quality of being a pig that is not defined as pink, mammal, or having a snout or curly tail.  ‘Pig-ness’ is what arises from the interaction of the descriptors of pig. 

If you’ve gone to any business HR meeting, you’ve probably heard them drone on and on about “Synergy”, about working together to achieve more than the sum of the individuals.  The mantra of synergy is “1+1=3”, and the analogy to Objet Petit a is fairly clear.  Pink, mammal, curly tail and snout are the “1+1” while pig is the “3”.   “Pig-ness” is that additional, unseen unit that comes from bringing 1+1 into interaction, resulting in 3.

Okay, sure, I guess I buy that.  But what are the consequences of this idea?

            Well, it’s a strong explanation of metonymic sliding, which sounds complicated, but is really a simple idea.  Metonymic sliding refers to how definitions change over time, what collection of descriptors define a word.  For example, let’s imagine we defined pig as a pink mammal with a snout and curly tail.  Then, one day, we discover a brown pig.  We wouldn’t then point at a pig, brown or pink, and say “This thing we thought was a pig is not really a pig”.  Instead, the definition of pig would change (i.e. not including the pink descriptor), rather than finding a new word.  The reason we don’t come up with a new word is because both the brown and pink pigs have that essential ‘pig-ness’, Objet Petit a.  Metonymic sliding seems to only occur around related concepts, but through great effort you can actually force metonymic sliding to occur.  In fact, the reason “pig” is slang for a police officer is because the Black Panther Party made an effort to do so in their propaganda.  They originally tried to associate the police with “dogs” but found “pigs” stuck better.

No, I meant what are the consequences to your essay.  Why does this matter to the idea of ‘national character’ and postfascism?

            Well, the idea of ‘national character’ is essentially Objet Petit a.  If “Swedish” is defined by care for the elderly, mutual care and making fun of the Danish, those are the “1+1”, the descriptors.  Swedish then becomes the “3” in the equation, where the additional unit comes from this idea of “Swedish-ness”, the essential quality of being Swedish divorced from any particular descriptor (much like “pig-ness”).  But because of metonymic sliding, the descriptors that define “Swedish” can change while leaving the idea of “Swedish-ness” or “Swedish national character” intact.  The reason that this is helpful to the postfascist is that the idea of the national character can be whatever A: the postfascist wants to define it as and B: whatever is politically expedient to define it as.  And if they can get this emphasis on “Swedish-ness” or “Swedish national character” into the discourse–

Oh, I think I get where you’re going with this.  Once they get this amorphous ‘national character’ idea into the discourse, the postfascist can slowly start to change the meaning of the term to a more racialized understanding through metonymic sliding, which was their goal all along!

            Wow, I’m impressed, took the words right out of my mouth!  With this in mind, we can see more clearly what these postfascists mean.  We understand, for example, what Trump really means when he says “The West will never, ever be broken.  Our values will prevail.”  We can see clearly the ideological sleight-of-hand Le Pen plays when she appeals to the French tradition of Laïcité in order to attack Muslim beach-goers.  Or why Nigel Farage crowed on-and-on about Muslim immigrants who are “coming to take us over” while assuring us that he doesn’t hate Muslims, he just doesn’t think they can “assimilate”.

Okay, so let’s say these figures are postfascist.  Why should we care?  That is, why should we care anymore than other people with similar Bad Views™ that aren’t postfascists?

             The core danger of the postfascist is not the postfascist themselves, but the conditions they create.  In Traverso’s view, the ultimate result of a postfascist politics is a system ripe for transformation to a more dangerous, neofascist politics (à la Golden Dawn).  It echoes a sentiment expressed by Theodor Adorno; that it is far more worrisome that Nazism survived within the liberal democracy of Weimar Germany than its survival after taking state power.  The postfascist’s positions are abhorrent, obviously, but what’s worrying is their success within and ability to subvert neoliberal democracy.

But how does the postfascist accomplish this?

         The word ‘praxis’ (coming from German for ‘practice’) refers to the methods by which you put your political ideas into practice.  For example, praxis for environmentalists ranges from voting for Green candidates to tree spiking.  Postfascists have a very novel form of praxis which I will refer to as “Uncoupling”.

Did you make that term up?

            No, but I did borrow a similar term from biology.  In each of your cells, you have mitochondria which, if you ever go on social media, you know is the powerhouse of the cell.  They accomplish this through oxidative phosphorylation which is the summation of two coupled processes.  The first component is the electron transport chain, which produces a proton gradient.  The second part is the chemiosmotic component, in which protons flowing down their gradient through the ATP synthase in order to produce ATP (the ‘energy currency’ of the cell).  The proton gradient thus ended, the electron transport chain can begin to function again.

I followed … little of that.

            You don’t have to understand the minutiae; all you have to know is that the two components rely on each other.  The electron transport chain is needed for chemiosmosis which is in turn needed for the electron transport chain.  That is, they are coupled.  Now, there are molecules called ‘uncoupling agents’ that, as the name suggests, uncouple the two processes.  An example of an uncoupling agent is 2,4-DNP.  What it does is it allows protons to flow down their gradient without passing through the ATP synthase, ending the proton gradient and allowing the electron transport chain to function again.  Thus, you could say 2,4-DNP makes the electron transport chain no longer reliant on the chemiosmotic component–

Hence ‘uncoupling’, I get it.  What does this have to do with postfascism?

            Well, you’ll remember I mentioned how fascists derive their legitimacy, right?  Through internal institutions?  Well, the way the postfascist lays the groundwork for fascism is by uncoupling institutions from their external sources of legitimation.  Take the judiciary, for example.  The judiciary in a functioning democracy gains its legitimacy by being an impartial interpreter of the law, making it an external institution.  So the postfascist will attack this source of legitimacy by saying things like “the courts are biased against us, deep state!” when they lose or “the courts support us!” when they win.  Those opposed to the postfascist will then respond to them by showing how, actually, they’re wrong that the courts do/don’t support them.

What makes this claim of bias for/against the postfascist so important?

            Well here’s the rub; look at the language of the argument.  When the postfascist says the courts are biased against them because of some ruling, they suggest that means the courts are illegitimate.  Similarly, by holding up the times the courts hand them a win, they imply the courts are legitimate because they sided with the postfascists.  The implicit argument being made is that the legitimacy of the courts depends on whether or not it supports the postfascist.  This is exactly the same type of relationship a fascist regime cultivates with its internal institutions!  And when well-meaning opponents try to contradict these claims (e.g. “No, the courts don’t support you, look at this time they contradicted you!”), they end up accidentally reinforcing postfascist logic by implying the legitimacy of the courts comes from supporting or not supporting the postfascist!  By debating using the terms of the postfascist, the postfascist has already won.  They have uncoupled the court’s legitimacy from its neutral interpretation of the law and recoupled it to its support/non-support of the postfascist!

So, what are you suggesting exactly?  Don’t argue with postfascists or the far-right?  The only winning move is not to play?

            Well, no.  You just have to make sure you’re not allowing them implicit victories by arguing in their vocabulary.  In fact, it’s important to push back on these arguments before the uncoupling effect occurs because once something is uncoupled, it’s hard to recouple it.  Take mask usage in the US; what once was coupled to the ‘non-political’ question of public health is now seen as commentary on whether you support Trump or not! 

            Of course, it gets more serious than examples like this (not that mask-wearing is inconsequential).  Think of the court-stuffing of Poland after the ruling PiS party had derided the courts for years.  Or the rule-by-decree of Hungary after delegitimizing any opposition as being Soros-funded (which they swear isn’t an anti-Semitic dog-whistle) and illegitimate as a result.  My great fear, at present moment, is what I view as an attempt by American postfascists to uncouple the police from their outside legitimation as (theoretically) neutral enforcers of the law for the public good.

Why?  What evidence do you have for that?

            Well, let’s look at the rhetoric coming out of Trump.  He is quick to paint opponents as “anti-police”, as “far-left anarchists” (perhaps the most well-known anti-police group).  Meanwhile, he portrays himself and his following as the police’s biggest (and only) true supporters.  He tells them to “not be too nice” when arresting people, giving them a blank cheque for arbitrary violence and reinforcing their unquestioning support for the police.  Why does Trump support the police?  Well, because the police support him overwhelmingly.  And why do cops in turn generally support Trump?  Well, because Trump supports them!  We see here the beginnings of that legitimation-by-internal-institution relationship described earlier.

            And what are the consequences of this uncoupling?  Well, of course, it’s not an immediate thing, but you can see the most obvious signs in actions where they clearly pull away from the laws that (again, theoretically) legitimate their power.  You see it when Minneapolis cops hold dangerous ‘Warrior Training’, which refers to its own teaching as ‘Killology’, despite the mayor banning it.  You see it when cops purposefully cover up their badges so that they can engage in brutality without consequence.  And you see it when police pepper spray their own state senator.  I don’t highlight these examples to argue these are the most egregious offences committed by police, that honour goes to the ongoing brutalization and murder of marginalized people, particularly BIPOC.  I highlight these examples to emphasize that these are actions by police that are in direct contradictions to the laws that (theoretically) legitimate them and are thus indicative of uncoupling in process.

Okay, I can maybe see that, but why is this happening?  Why are Nazis, postfascists, or any other flavour of far-right ascendant now?

            Well, as with anything, there are a number of factors: economic downturn, early right-wing dominance of internet political spaces, white reaction against the Obama presidency, the migrant crisis in Europe, the rise of IS and the consequent rise in Islamophobia, and many other factors.   But the factor I’d like to focus on is the impact of postmodernist thought on our understanding of identity.

Postfascism, poststructuralism, and now postmodernism; lots of ‘post’-isms in this essay.  Postmodernism?

            The future is now, old man!  Postmodernism is a somewhat vaguely defined movement that can be seen as a reaction to modernism.  Modernism is characterized by metanarratives, like Historical Materialism for example, which describes history as a progression from slavery to feudalism to capitalism to socialism to communism.  Metanarratives exist in almost every field from politics, to history, to gender and sexuality, to ethnicity and race just about everything in between.  Postmodernism calls these narratives into question by calling into question both metanarratives and even the existence of the characters therein.   Take Judith Butler for example (whose work I’ve written about before), a postmodern feminist.  Butler not only calls the idea of ‘woman’ into question by pointing out how it’s essentially a construction, but even calls into question the idea of sex and gender as categories themselves!  It’s a fascinating argument that I will (eventually) go into greater depth on.

Okay, interesting, I guess.  But what does postmodernism have to do with the rise of postfascism and the far-right generally?

            First, a slight tangent!  Like any discipline, gender studies has evolved over the years.  For a while, scholars would look into periods where masculinity was believed to be in crisis, like when disabled WWI veterans found themselves emasculated by their disability.  Today, there’s a bit of a truism in gender studies circles responding to this: “Masculinity is always in crisis”.  Of course, this is not some misandrist dig at men, but an understanding that men across time have always had insecurities about being sufficiently masculine or a ‘real man’.  This kind of crisis of identity is similar to what Lacan refers to as the hysterical question.

Wait, like, coming from the word ‘hysteria’?  Freud’s method of diagnosing women as crazy?

            Yes, the idea of hysteria has misogynist roots, but Lacan uses it in a very particular way.  Per Lacan, hysteria is a form of psychological structure, a mode in which the subject engages with the world.  The crux of the problem for the hysterical person is a preoccupation with the so-called hysterical question; “What do you really mean?”  That may seem strange, as it did for me upon first reading, so let’s give a couple examples:

• A student is accepted into their dream college.  Immediately, they get imposter syndrome; “What does it mean that they accepted me?  Is it because my father/mother is an alum?  Some other factor?  Dumb luck?”  Rather than accepting it on its face, the student hysterically seeks the ‘true meaning’ or ‘true reason’ behind the acceptance, rather than accepting they got in.
• A person is romantically interested in a close friend.  Every conversation they have with their friend, they seek for evidence their feelings are reciprocated.  They replay every conversation, every text, every interaction in their head, trying to suss out clues that would indicate the true meaning of their conversations.  That is, the hysteria is shown in this assumption of a hidden message, rather than accepting the most straightforward interpretation.

            Identity crises basically derive from hysterical questions.  For example, masculinity in crisis can be understood as “What does it really mean to be a man?  What does it really mean that I am a man?  Am I really a man/masculine?”  It can be seen as an attempt to suss out the relation between Objet Petit a (i.e. “X-ness”) and the object itself (i.e. “X”), even when no such direct link exists.  The hysterical question provokes reflection on the identity itself, to which there can be many responses.

Such as?

            One obvious response is a change in definition or expectations of a particular identity, the metonymic sliding mentioned earlier.  Masculinity, for example, has changed immensely over time.  For example, to many men, it comes off as unmanly that Odysseus cried all the time in The Odyssey while it would have appeared very manly to the ancient Greeks.  

Another way to deal with identity crisis is to learn to live with it, like a man who recognizes “Actually, I’m just not that masculine, but I’m okay with that!”  This is generally more difficult because it requires a well-developed self-esteem and a relative toughness against those that would attack them for this perceived insufficiency. 

The other major mode historically is a lot less savoury.  This is the use of violence to suppress the differences between an identity’s expectations/ideals and lived reality.  Examples include murders of trans people due to ‘trans panic’, closeted right-wing politicians passing queerphobic legislation and the (scarily relevant) tendency of emasculated WWI veterans to join fascist groups.  The far-right, with its emphasis on redemptive violence and a prelapsarian vision of the past, almost always engages in this kind of identity-reinforcing violence.  This has a natural appeal to people who would tend toward this kind of violence.

Ah, I see.  So, when identities come into crisis, some people engage in violence to try and prop those identities up.  And the far-right particularly appeals to people with that kind of tendency?

            Exactly. 

Okay, but then why is the far-right ascendant now?  If identities are always in crisis, and those crises can push people towards identity-reinforcing violence (and as a result, often the far-right), why are we seeing an ascendant far-right now?

Good point!  You are right, identities are in perpetual crisis, but our current postmodern crisis of identity is unique.  For example, all hitherto crises of masculinity have been concerns over what masculinity is, but today’s postmodern crisis of masculinity is over if masculinity is.  That is, this crisis of masculinity is unique because postmodernism is calling into question the category of masculinity itself, literally unprecedented!  Of course, this is taking place in other questions of identity as well (ethnicity, disability, culture, etc).  So I’d posit that, due to postmodernism’s deconstruction of identity categories, people find themselves increasingly unable to deal with crises of identity.  This is because they cannot, in response to this crisis, redefine what their identity is or means because the question is ‘if’, not ‘what’.  With this avenue closed off, more people are likely to find themselves drawn to identity-reinforcing violence and those that advocate it (like the far-right). 

As has been said by folks more clever than myself, say what you will about the tenets of fascism, but it does provide a narrative and identity.  A narrative and identity built on a mountain of corpses, but a narrative and identity nonetheless.  And that can appeal to people.

So postmodernism is to blame?

            Yes and no.  Yes, postmodernism effectively closes off one form of response to identity crisis, that of redefining identity through metonymic sliding.  Yes, this has resulted in more folks finding identity-reinforcing violence appealing.  However, postmodernism didn’t force these people to choose this, they could well have had another response to identity crisis.  The fact that these people then chose identity-reinforcing violence is more telling of those people (and the society that moulded them) than of postmodernism.  There is nothing about postmodernism that inherently pushes people towards the far-right.  More disturbing still, I think that this tendency towards identity-reinforcing violence is only going to be exacerbated by the pandemic.

Why do you think that?

            Well, what has been your experience with the pandemic so far?

Well, lots of downtime for sure.  Read a lot, played a lot of video games, binged some Netflix.  You know, usual stuff … Oh!  I’ve gotten really good at baking!

            You and everyone else apparently, but not exactly what I was referring to.  Have you been a good citizen during quarantine?  Or have you been like these folks:

No, no, I’ve been responsible.  I haven’t gone out and I’ve kept an eye out for COVID-19 symptoms.  In fact, the only people I’ve seen are my clients and my partner.

            Partner?  When’d that happen?

I reserve the right to maintain an air of mystery about me.  What about yourself?

            Fair enough!  Well, you’ve seen my situation.  I live here alone, save for my housemates (who I’m friendly with, but not strictly friends).  In fact, you’re really the only person I see on a regular basis.

I guess we now know why you use dialogue as your essay format.

            Hey, only I’m allowed to do the psychoanalysis here!  Anyways, the point is the pandemic and consequent quarantine has increased the amount of time people have spent in isolation.  This increased isolation, I’d argue, is something that is accelerating the destabilization of identity, much like I’ve experienced.  And not just because people go a little crazy after extended isolation.

Okay, how so?

            Well, identity only exists insofar as it can contrast itself with another identity.  So you can imagine that lack of contact with contrasting identities due to quarantine leads to greater destabilization of identity.

Hold on a sec, what do you mean by that?  My identity isn’t defined by other people!

            Yes, you’re right, your sense of identity isn’t something someone dictated to you.  Like, nobody came to you and said “Hey, you!  You’re X, Y and Z”.  But while your identity is something you’ve come to understand organically; those identities can’t exist without outside identities against which to define it.  If, for example, all men were to suddenly cease to exist, so too would the idea of woman.

But that’s not true.  If all men disappeared tomorrow, women would still exist … hold on, that seems familiar.  Have we talked about this before?

         Yes, I alluded to this idea in the Ashnikko essay; Boss Bitch aesthetic cannot exist without ‘Stereotypical Rapper’ aesthetic because they are binaries that define each other.  Similarly, the argument would be that if all men were suddenly Thanos-ed, the identity of woman would cease to exist.  Of course, there’d still be people with XX chromosomes, higher levels of estrogen, etc, after such an event.  But ‘woman’ as an identity would cease to exist because part of the definition of woman is ‘not man’ (leaving aside the question of other genders for the moment).

            But more than that, the idea of identity only makes sense if identity identifies you in a way that’s distinct from others.  That’s why, when asked about my identity, I wouldn’t say “Warm-blooded, Oxygen-breathing, Carbon-based”.  That’s because noting these facts would not serve to identify me, because these facts are universal to the human experience.  Of course, these things are true, but they don’t contribute to a person’s identity.

            What this means is that any extended period of isolation, like quarantine, means extended time without exposure to contrasting identities.  And without that exposure, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain that identity.

Let me see if I got this right; previous crises of identity have been over ‘what’, not ‘if’.  We could deal with identity crises of ‘what’, but the postmodern identity crisis of ‘if’ is unprecedented.  More than that, this crisis of ‘if’ is exacerbated by the isolation of quarantine?

            That’s my claim.  And because some of our responses to past identity crises of ‘what’ don’t work for our crisis of ‘if’, more and more people are drawn towards identity-reinforcing violence.  And this tendency is a factor (of many) in the recent ascent of the far-right.

Fair enough, I buy it.  But simply describing a problem isn’t all that helpful!  What would you propose as a solution to these crises of identity?

            Well, I don’t have a concrete answer to that.  But a helpful lens to approach these questions can be found in Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto.   

And what’s that about?

            Donna Haraway, a core figure within posthumanist feminism (but a biologist by training), makes the case for what she calls ‘cyborg theory’.  Haraway argues that identities thus far have been based on ‘holistic politics’, identity as an organic whole of characteristics, but that this is now changing.  In A Cyborg Manifesto, she argues that the combination of late-stage capitalism, modern science and “the acid tools of postmodern theory” are dissolving these holistic identities.  For example, the holistic identity of woman might be described as being socialized as a woman, experiencing menustration and pregnancy and being raisers of children.  But due to the combination of factors cited by Haraway; there are women who do not go through traditional female socialization (e.g. some trans women), menustration and pregnancy are no longer the sole domain of women (e.g. trans men), and wealthy women increasingly outsource parenting to nannies.  With these factors dissolving the idea of ‘woman’ (and other identities), Haraway argues we should adopt cyborg identities.

And what exactly is ‘cyborg’ identity?

            Well, what is a cyborg?  Etymologically, it derives from the word ‘cyber’ and ‘organism’, a fusion of the two where robotic parts are grafted onto a person.  And while Haraway does argue that we are all cyborgs to an extent (an argument I won’t get into here), she argues we should have a cyborg approach to identity.  Identity is a collection of characteristics, and the cyborg approach is to essentially say those collections don’t make much sense.  Rather than try to determine “Am I straight or queer?  Am I a man or woman?  Man or robot?”, the cyborg approach to identity says “Why try and figure it out?”  The cyborg approach starts with the acknowledgement that everyone’s collection of attributes is unique and that nobody has every characteristic associated with any of their identities.  Thus, trying to fit people into one or more arbitrary identity/collection of attributes actually obscures more than it reveals.  Per the cyborg approach, everyone’s identity is unique because each combination of characteristics is different (and thus, so too is the interaction between those characteristics).

Is she just saying to not care about identity?  Just get over it because everyone’s different?

Well, not exactly.  Embracing cyborg identity means embracing one’s own characteristics and identifying with people based on shared experience and vulnerability (sometimes referred to as affinity groups).  This is as opposed to traditional identification, which is essentially ‘doing the math’ by looking at your characteristics and trying to find which arbitrary group of characteristics (i.e. identity) is closest to your own.  That is, traditional identification would describe someone as “woman”, cyborg identification would break that identity into pieces “person socialized as a woman”, “person who menstruates”, “person who raises children”, etc.  By breaking the identity down into its constituent parts, not only is it more accurate (because nobody fits all characteristics of an identity) but disposes with the arbitrary identity category which provokes hysterical questions.  That is, cyborg identification advocates breaking down identities, in effect dissolving the Objet Petit a of identity (e.g. ‘woman-ness’, ‘straight-ness’, etc) that comes from the collection of descriptors in interaction.

Okay, so what are you arguing then?  That we should all read A Cyborg Manifesto and break down all identities to their component parts?

            Well, yes and no.  I think the breaking down many of the current major identities (within gender, sex, race, ethnicity, possibly even class) into their constituent parts would probably be good in the short term.  I believe doing so would lead to greater human happiness and flourishing because dissolving these arbitrary identities would prevent them from becoming vectors of oppression.  That is, you can’t oppress women if the identity of ‘woman’ doesn’t exist!  Moreover, dissolving these identities prevents the hysterical questions that arise from the identity (which, as we saw, can have serious consequences). 

But of course, I recognize that cyborg theory is an imperfect solution.  For example, what’s to prevent these ‘smaller’ constituent identities from being broken down further (e.g. ‘person who menstruates’ into ‘person with heavy flow’, ‘person with light flow’, etc).  The cyborg approach to identification could probably continue ad absurdum and become counter-productive.  Moreover, in a political context, we need identity as something around which to rally. In the world we currently live in, people are oppressed because of their identity, and so we need those identity categories to exist in order to organize.  It’s all well and good for progressive-minded people to do the Parisian Philosophe thing in some contexts, discussing “Well what really is sex/gender/race/etc” while sipping espresso and smoking cigarettes.  But, the fact of the matter is that the majority of the world is still operating using traditional ideas of identity (and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future).

Well then, what’s your practical conclusion?

            We are, for better or worse, going through an unprecedented time.  Living in the postmodern era is living in a world where ideas that were long treated as immutable truths (gender, sex, race, ethnicity, class, etc) are being interrogated.  It is an era defined by the hysterical question and our response to it.  As shown by the ascension of the far-right and particularly postfascism, such questions can have dire consequences.  For those of us opposed to the identity-reinforcing violence advocated by the postfascist, it is a difficult world to navigate.  On the one hand, we recognize the coercive and toxic effects that identity can have as a vertex of oppression.  On the other, we recognize that simply not engaging with identity would be disastrous for those in marginalized groups.  So what I’d advocate, at least in the short-term, is a sort of Janus-faced approach.  On the one hand, we must look forward, working towards a world where identity is broken down in such a way that it becomes less oppressive or coercive.  But at the same time, we must be engaged in work that prevents oppression based on historical identities (without reifying those same identities).  It’s a difficult tightrope to walk, one I certainly don’t know how to walk perfectly.  But it’s a line we must be committed to.