Fighting Oligarchy and “End Times Fascism”
"While rightwing think tanks and dangerously misanthropic rightwing billionaires have been with us for decades, now the worst of the worst of them seem to be in the catbird seat."
After weeks of the mainstream media turning up their noses as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew huge crowds, surpassing even the biggest of those of Sanders’ upstart Presidential campaigns, the New York Times finally noticed and managed a condescension-free article about how the pair were “electrifying Democrats who want to fight Trump”:
The biggest political rallies anywhere in America right now are being headlined by an 83-year-old senator in the twilight of his career and his 35-year-old protégée.
Roughly 36,000 people in Los Angeles. More than 34,000 attendees in Denver. And another 30,000 on Tuesday night near Sacramento.
Those monster crowds — more than 200,000 people in all, according to organizers — have turned out to cheer on a fiery anti-Trump, anti-billionaire message from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York during their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour of Western states. Mr. Sanders even surprised attendees at the Coachella music festival near Los Angeles last week, popping onstage to introduce the singer Clairo and make an appeal to young people.
As Democrats search for a spark after being routed in November, the two progressives are providing the kindling, offering the party’s beaten-down base the fighting spirit it has been missing ever since President Trump returned to office.
Even as some top Democrats tack to the center or try to find common ground with the emboldened Republican president, Mr. Sanders and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez dismiss the notion of any concessions.
A couple hundred thousand people may not be enough to convince the corporate Democrats playing possum, but the energy of those rallies combined with the rolling protests across the country from small town halls to large, organically evolving “days of action” at least indicate that there is a growing awareness at the grassroots level that business as usual is over. While rightwing think tanks and dangerously misanthropic rightwing billionaires have been with us for decades, now the worst of the worst of them seem to be in the catbird seat. This time something is distinctly different.
In a recent, provocative essay in the Guardian, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor dub the extremism of the moment “end times fascism,” a hybrid beast made up of corporate anarchists looking to tear it all down in favor of their own heavily-bunkered privatopias, transhumanist tech bros, and a variety of other dystopian strains of the MAGA movement eager take advantage of a change to inflict trauma, pain, and even physical violence on their perceived enemies. How is this possible? Klein and Taylor argue that:
Three recent material developments have accelerated end times fascism’s apocalyptic appeal. The first is the climate crisis. While some high-profile figures might still publicly deny or minimize the threat, global elites, whose ocean-front properties and datacenters are intensely vulnerable to rising temperatures and sea levels, are well-versed in the ramifying perils of an ever-heating world. The second is Covid-19: epidemiological models had long predicted the possibility of a pandemic devastating our globally networked world; the actual arrival of one was taken by many powerful people as a sign that we have officially arrived at what US military analysts forecasted as “the Age of Consequences”. No more predictions, it’s going down. The third factor is the rapid advancement and adoption of AI, a set of technologies that have long been associated with sci-fi terrors about machines turning on their makers with ruthless efficiency – fears expressed most forcefully by the same people who are developing these technologies. All of these existential crises are layered on top of escalating tensions between nuclear-armed powers.
Thus, the end times fascists, they argue, are betting big on the opportunity that crisis creates and are gleefully swinging the wrecking ball because it serves their project of remaking the world out of the ruins of the old:
It’s also a self-reinforcing downward spiral: Trump’s furious attacks on every structure designed to protect the public from diseases, dangerous foods and disasters – even to tell the public when disasters are headed their way – strengthen the case for prepperism at both the high and low ends, all while creating myriad new opportunities for privatization and profiteering by the oligarchs powering this rapid-fire unmaking of the social and regulatory state.
Klein and Taylor conclude their piece by suggesting that only a countermovement that tells a better story, one of “interdependence and belonging” rather than “separation and supremacy,” is sufficient to break the fever dream that brought us the end times fascists. We need to call for a world where everyone survives and can live with dignity. And, as Sanders and AOC seem to be showing us, there are a lot of people ready to answer that call once they see what is plain as the nose on their faces—that the only group benefiting from the new regime in Washington is an oligarchy that doesn’t care about anything but themselves and their last little dollar.
It may feel like the end of the world when you turn on the news every day, but it doesn’t have to be that way. We can write our own story.