For Antifascist Futures

Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis

Alyosha Goldstein, Simón Ventura Trujillo

• Publisher: Common Notions
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781942173649
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Fascism & Totalitarianism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

We must, as For Antifascist Futures urges, take antifascism as a major imperative of movements for social change. But we must not limit our analysis or historical understanding of the rise of the right-wing authoritarianism in our times by rooting it in mid-twentieth century Europe. Instead we turn to a collection of powerful BIPOC voices who offer a range of anticolonial, Indigenous, and Black Radical traditions to think with.

For Antifascist Futures: Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis takes seriously what is new in this moment of politics, exploring what the analytic of fascism offers for understanding the twenty-first century authoritarian convergence by centering the material and speculative labor of antifascist and antiracist social movement coalitions. By focusing on the long history of BIPOC antifascist resistance that has been overlooked in both recent conversations about racial justice as well as antifascist resistance, the essays, interviews, and documents included here make clear how racialized and colonized peoples have been at the forefront of theorizing and dismantling fascism, white supremacy, and other modes of authoritarian rule.

By linking a deep engagement, both scholarly and practical, of racial justice movements with an antifascist frame, and a global analysis of capitalism the contributors have assembled a powerful toolbox for our struggles. The editors, widely recognized ethnic and American studies scholars, offer a groundbreaking collection with contributions from Johanna Fernandez, Manu Karuka, Charisse Burden-Stelly, Zoé Samudzi, and Macarena Gomez-Barris, among others.

III. Spectacles of National Security

CHAPTER NINE “Make fascism great again!”

Mapping the Conceptual Work of “Fascism” in the War on Terror

Nicole Nguyen and Yazan Zahzah

The political charge of the fascism label

Since the 2017 presidential inauguration in the United States, political scientists and popular media alike have debated if President Donald J. Trump qualifies as a “fascist” or “terrorist” president. Social scientist and Anatomy of Fascism author Robert Paxton classified Trump as a fascist, calling attention to his “America First” message, “Make America Great Again” emblems, violent threats, and nationalist militias like the Proud Boys that “have stood in convincingly for Hitler’s Storm Troopers and Mussolini’s squadristi.”¹ For Paxton, these acts, symbols, and armed militants make up the “anatomy” of fascism, which he defines as:

political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.²

Roger Griffin, political theorist and author of The Nature of Fascism, contends that labeling Trump a fascist is irresponsible; he notes, “You can be a total xenophobic racist male chauvinist bastard and still not be a fascist.”³ For the average person residing in the US, the fascist label has served as an indictment of Trump’s harmful rhetoric and policies, a rallying cry to challenge the Trump administration, and a desperate effort to define a political moment that seemed to defy all historical conventions. Political activists even transformed Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan into a political allegation: “Make fascism great again!”

In this context, supporting Senator Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential bid was framed as a “vote against fascism.”⁴ Accordingly, a Biden presidency would mark a return to democratic politics and values as well as the professional performances expected of a sitting president. If President Trump was an aberration from ‘business as usual’ in US governance, President Biden could return the country to its rightful political state, regardless of his troubling record on immigration, war, policing, and civil rights. In fact, Biden himself promised he would “be an ally of the light, not of the darkness” and help the United States “overcome this season of darkness.”⁵

Reflecting on Biden’s interventionist record and current administration, Center for International Policy fellow Danny Sjursen writes that “[Biden’s] filled his foreign policy squad with Obama-Clinton retreads, a number of whom were architects of—if not the initial Iraq and Afghan debacles then—disasters in Libya, Syria, West Africa, Yemen, and the Afghan surge of 2009. In other words, Biden is putting the former arsonists in charge of the forever-war fire brigade.”⁶ While some viewed a Biden administration as a “vote against fascism,” others saw it as a continuation of US governance and therefore refused to see the Trump administration as a mere “season.”

These debates reflect the tension in naming political formations and the conceptual work such labels do by shaping public understandings of presidential administrations and informing subsequent political action such as voting. Rather than engage in an arguably objective assessment if either administration conforms to academic definitions of para-, semi-, generic-, or pseudo-fascism,⁷ this chapter examines the conceptual work the fascism label is called on to undertake. More specifically, we argue that the term fascism has been mobilized to delegitimize certain forms of US empire, war, and security—like Trump’s proposed Build the Wall, Enforce the Law Act—while authorizing the outwardly liberal manifestations of hegemonic regimes of power, such as President Barack Obama’s “deportation machine” that “turbocharged” immigration enforcement and the use of “precision” drone strikes that ostensibly targeted terrorist leaders and reduced US military casualties.

The political, polemical, and affective desires to define Trump as a fascist ruler exceptionalize his administration and its nationalist brutality. These charged desires also erase the forms of violence and death-dealing the United States uses irrespective of its presidential administration and therefore undermine a robust political analysis.

Although many political commentators worried about Trump’s access to nuclear weapons,presidential administrations have long used brutal warfare to pursue its foreign policy interests. In January 2009, for example, Obama ordered his first drone strike, hitting a civilian home in North Waziristan, Pakistan. Obama justified these “surgical strikes” as a way to assassinate suspected terrorists on the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Disposition Matrix. Obama insisted that these drone strikes constituted a “just war—a war waged proportionally, in last resort, and in self-defense” and therefore conformed to international and domestic law.⁸ Later, he defended his use of drone strikes after the killing of two US hostages in Pakistan, stating, “one of the things that sets America apart from many other nations, one of the things that makes us exceptional, is our willingness to confront squarely our imperfections and to learn from our mistakes.”⁹

To justify these illiberal practices, Obama invoked just war theory, legal conventions, and American exceptionalism. Such overtures echo Clinton-era Secretary of State, Madeline Albright’s defense of US airstrikes against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are an indispensable nation.”¹⁰ Such rhetoric forecasted Trump’s invocation of “the defense of our nation and its citizens” to justify his drone assassination of Qasem Soleimani, for allegedly “plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel.”¹¹ Emblematic of his “America First” mantra, Trump concluded, “If Americans anywhere are threatened, we have all of those targets already fully identified, and I am ready and prepared to take whatever action necessary.”¹²

Across presidential administrations, the United States has justified the use of lethal force by evoking the twin specters of national security and American exceptionalism. Even as Trump operated in a different register—distinctly refusing to disguise illiberal practices like extrajudicial killings in liberal discourses that invoke the law and humanitarian intent—his forms of death-dealing extended previous generations of US empire.

Historicizing Trump’s assassination of Qasem Soleimani refuses to exceptionalize his administration as an aberration in US politics and demonstrates the nationalist political ideology—inflected by professed ideals like American exceptionalism, humanitarian intervention, and just war—that has historically organized US-led violence. Labeling Trump as a fascist ruler—an exceptional “season of darkness” in US governance—denies the ideological and material underpinnings that have shaped US violence since its very inception.

President George W. Bush, for example, mobilized nationalist rhetoric to describe the United States as a defender of liberty and justice, primed to “bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world.”¹³ In this political calculus, American exceptionalism justified Bush declaring war without congressional approval.

Furthermore, classifying Trump as a fascist means that what incites outrage are illiberal practices without liberal discourses. In other words, the fascism label has delegitimized clearly illiberal forms of US empire like Trump’s border wall, while simultaneously affirming similar practices draped in a liberal veneer, such as Obama’s deportation machine, which he deployed alongside his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

January 20, 2021: democracy prevailing?

After the 2020 presidential election, the United States faced a particularly pressured political moment. Given both intensive political repression and COVID-19 spikes, the Movement for Black Lives protests of the summer after the police killing of George Floyd began to wane. Trump warned that he would refuse to leave office, regardless of the electoral outcome. The looming threat of vigilante violence to protect Trump’s declaration sent waves of instability through communities across the United States. The ensuing attempted armed takeover of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 created a sense of imminent national crisis. As Trump deployed the National Guard to protect the Capitol from his own armed militia, people reached for terms like “coup” and “civil war” to make sense of the spectacle. Biden even called for the restoration of “just, simple decency” following the January 6 events.

Given the attempted armed takeover, the intensity of the election process, and Trump’s willful delay of Biden’s transition into office, by January 20, 2021, several media outlets described the inauguration as a triumph.¹⁴ With headlines and news coverage emphasizing Biden’s kindness, calm nature, and sympathetic approach, many in the United States believed that democracy had prevailed. With Trump’s legacy and “season of darkness” in the country’s rearview mirror, the United States could return to “simple decency” under a new administration.

Even as Biden identified the need to “repair,” “restore,” “heal,” and “build” in his inaugural address, he almost immediately initiated military interventions, anti-Muslim national security policies, and coercive policing tactics to repress political dissidence. For example, within the first month of his presidency, Biden launched airstrikes against Iran-backed militias in Syria by bypassing congressional approval.¹⁵ After alleging that these militias attacked US forces in Iraq, Biden warned that Iran could not “act with impunity” and described the strike as both lawful and necessary.¹⁶ Biden’s decision to suspend the second wave of airstrikes because “a woman and children were spotted in the area” became an act of emotional reprieve and military restraint, ultimately erasing the weight of his first strike—the casualties, the political unclarity around its relevance, the lack of congressional consultation. The fact that Biden bypassed Congress to enact the airstrike made fleeting waves despite its familiar connotations: acting with “impetuousness.”¹⁷

This “firm but fair” logic, and its accompanying paternalistic approach, echoes Obama’s framing of the global war on terror as both lawful and in the interests of human security. Artfully condemning war as he praised it, Obama stated the following about Afghanistan and the war at lar...