I am often struck by the disconnect between non-revolutionary authors’ often brilliant descriptions of grave contemporary problems and those authors’ far less impressive understanding of the origins of those problems and what is to be done to solve them[1].

Fascism with an Apocalyptic Twist

Take the celebrated social democrats Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s new book End Times Fascism and the Fight for a Livable World. To their credit, Klein and Taylor don’t hold back from properly labeling what we are up against with the Trump regime and likeminded regimes around the world as fascism. They deserve further praise for naming the system behind the menace as capitalism.

Klein and Taylor advance a serviceable if rather incomplete and perhaps overly elaborate description of fascism:

“Revolutions are often uprisings of the weak and downtrodden. Fascism, in contrast, is a revolt of the strong or relatively strong and injured that, while antidemocratic, taps into powerful popular passions and resentments. Its leaders have frequently been military veterans who recently lost on the battlefield, working with business owners facing threats to the bottom lines, and, at times, conservative religious leaders. In moments of widespread economic crisis and social turmoil, fascists build mass movements by fusing and equating elite experiences of injury and lost status with the more widespread pain of working people, particularly men whose pride has been injured. Unlike workers’ revolutions, which have the goal of transforming and remaking societies from below, fascists movements claim to be defending powerful institutions – the nation, the market, the military, the family – from internal and external pollutants. In the logic of fascism, the task of defeating those threats, and reimposing order, requires emergency measures, often destroying many of the very institutions fascists claim to be defending” (End Times Fascism, p. 9).

None of that is incorrect – and neither is the description they paste in from the historian Robert Paxton[2] – but the meat of the matter gets a bit lost in that paragraph. Fascism seeks the dictatorial “might makes right” makeover of government, politics, and society in service to virulent and often genocidal racism, misogynist patriarchy, xenophobic nationalism, endless war, and savage capitalist class rule.

Consistent with Klein’s previous books The Shock Doctrine and Disaster Capitalism, Klein and Taylor distinguish between the classic historical fascism of Mussolini and Hitler and the “end times” fascism of Trump and his 21st century ilk, who have arisen in a time of accelerating climate catastrophe and thermonuclear war menace:

“While the violence European fascists inflicted on their internal outgroups and external enemies was indeed apocalyptic, they were not typically imagining the end of the world so much as the destruction of particular parts of it. At least some of them foresaw a future where the wars came to an end, and a purified, wealthy, stable national body emerged…[serving] not just the rich, but for the working-class base as well…This is where Trump and other far-right leaders in his orbit depart sharply from their predecessors…The politicians driving end times fascism are too kleptocratic, too focused on hoarding for themselves and their class, to deliver on their vague campaign promises of better days…[Their] Armageddon complex …has become a unifying and guiding principle. End times fascism does not offer an end to apocalyptic violence and turmoil, only the chance to believe in one of its visions of bunkered survivalism as the human project goes down.”

I am reminded here of something Noam Chomsky said in a January 2020 interview, explaining why he considered Trump and not Hitler as “the most dangerous criminal in human history”:

“Hitler had been perhaps the leading candidate for this honor. His goal was to rid the German-run world of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other ‘deviants,’ along with tens of millions of Slav ‘Untermenschen.’ But Hitler was not dedicated with fervor to destroying the prospects of organized human life on Earth in the not-distant future (along with millions of other species). Trump is. And those who think he doesn’t know what he’s doing haven’t been looking closely.”

(That is even truer now than it was seven years ago: the Trump47 regime makes the Trumpp45 one look mild by comparison.)

Three Core Constituents

Klein and Taylor identify three leading driving forces behind this new apocalyptic end-of-days fascism: (i) the “religious end-timers,” the “Rapture-ready” Christian fascists who look forward to a Biblical Armageddon; (ii) the “tech end-timers,” the billionaire Silicon Valley “Nerd Reich” tech bros who Klein and Taylor rightly call “the faction of the capitalist class that would most dramatically flip to align with end times fascism” (p. 35), seeking “an escape into the [digital] cloud” following the destruction of jobs and livable ecology that they themselves advance; (iii) the “ethno-nationalist end-timers” and “remigration” advocates who seek a “bunkered Fortress State” in genocidally racist response to the supposed existential menace to “Western civilization” posed by nonwhite migration and “white replacement.”

“The Left’s Own Dangerous Messianism”

It isn’t just the right that Klein and Taylor charge with horrendous thinking. End Times Fascism skewers “the left’s own dangerous history of messianism, culminating in its own horrors,” reflecting what they call “once-pervasive dogmas and delusions, including a mechanical and misleading view of history marching ineluctably towards a workers’ utopia.” This is a not-so veiled attack on the communist-led socialist revolutions and first socialist states in Russia (1917-1956) and China (1949-1976). Klein and Taylor advocate “a more credible and unassuming Eden: the ongoing work of improving our collective condition on a living planet, ailing but still teeming with divinity” (p. 267).

“Migrants are the Contemporary Monster”

Klein and Taylor take their reader on an extensive tour through the new triple end-timer fascist nightmare that has congealed its hatred around the supposed dire threat embodied in “the figure of the migrant…In the past,” they write, in an exceptional passage:

“fascism has been animated primarily by hatred of fellow citizens – those of a different ideological persuasion, religion, skin color, or sexual orientation – as well as of enemy nations. Today, these rages persist, but it is the figure of the migrant, the noncitizen ‘invader,’ that most bands together the global far right in common hatred and fear, from Norway to Australia, Canda to Chile. The centrality of migrant hatred is inextricable from the end times quality of today’s fascism. Migrants are the contemporary monster precisely because so many........

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