On Thursday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott pardoned a man who was convicted of killing 28-year-old Black Lives Matter protester Garrett Foster in the summer of 2020. Foster’s killer, Daniel S. Perry, was characterized as “basically a loaded gun” by psychiatric experts during the sentencing phase of his trial. Abbott’s pardon of Perry is reminiscent of so-called “driver immunity laws” in Florida, Iowa and Oklahoma, that extend legal protections to people who strike protesters with their cars. Legislators in at least 11 states have attempted to pass such legislation, effectively signaling their support for vigilantes, even when the bills themselves fail to become law. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, our government does not simply maintain a monopoly on violence but also delegates violence. This has been the case throughout U.S. history, as some people have been empowered to commit violence without consequence, while others have been condemned to endure it without recourse. These distinctions are felt most severely, and violence is exercised most enthusiastically when the status quo and those who benefit from it feel threatened.

In a 2018 blog post, composer Frank Wilhoit wrote:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

When I talk about fascism, people will often mention this quote. I understand why. It’s a well-formed explanation of why the liberal tendency to focus on conservative hypocrisy, rather than conservative hierarchy, is a failure of analysis. However, I do not believe the dynamic Wilhoit describes is limited to conservatism. Rather, I believe that dynamic represents the norms of white supremacy, capitalism, and empire, which are maintained by both Democrats and Republicans. When protests effectively challenge the status quo, we see Democratic mayors enforce these same norms by way of the most legitimized purveyors of such violence: police.

As I contemplate the fascist potential of the United States, in this historical moment, another quote comes to mind. In his book Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis, Alberto Toscano writes:

If fascism is also a product of the long history of ‘race wars’, then we cannot understand the fascist potentials of U.S. nativism without attending, as [Nikhil Pal] Singh does, to the Indian Wars, and to the ways in which the settler-colonial........

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