The New Fascists | Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor interview

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Am I tough enough? Strong and stable leadership.

SPEAKER_2 (0:02)

Total ruba.

SPEAKER_3 (0:03)

Hell yes, I'm tough enough.

SPEAKER_1 (0:04)

Shut the fridge.

Naomi Klein (0:05)

Not another once.

SPEAKER_2 (0:07)

It's the PoliticsJOE Podcast.

Naomi Klein (0:10)

I'm Naomi Klein.

Astra Taylor (0:11)

My name is Astra Taylor.

Naomi Klein (0:12)

I'm a writer.

Astra Taylor (0:13)

I'm an organizer.

Naomi Klein (0:14)

And I am the co-author of a new book called End Times Fascism.

Astra Taylor (0:19)

And the Fight for the Living World.

Naomi Klein (0:20)

So there's this idea that fascism is this one thing fixed in time, and that it could always return in exactly the same way that it appeared in the 20th century in Italy and Germany under Hitler and Mussolini.

And so often we're looking for an exact replica of what fascism looked like then.

But we argue that fascism is in fact a through line in history of Western civilization and it surges at particular moments in time when the system is in crisis and also when there is a genuine threat of redistribution and challenge to that system from below. We define fascism as capitalism's most ferocious threat response. It is capitalism with its teeth bared. And because capitalism runs through this history, it changes with history, it changes with time. So the fascism that we are facing is specific to our time of planetary scale crises. It emerges in response to crises that were unimaginable in their scale to the fascists of the early 20th century who did not know a world with nuclear weapons in it, who did not understand the reality of climate change on a planetary scale. And because of these changes, the fascists of today have a much stronger apocalyptic imaginary. They see our current world in a state of collapse. And the truth is, many of us see these global crises, but rather than trying to solve them, trying to get at the roots of these crises. Today's fascists slam their foot on the pedal and are laser focused on survival for the chosen few.

Astra Taylor (2:30)

We're really holding up the whole world.

SPEAKER_2 (2:33)

It's on our shoulders.

Astra Taylor (2:35)

Fascism always emerges in times of crises. So we saw this in the 20th century when classic European fascism emerged out of the wreckage of the First World War and the Great Depression.

And there was pervasive insecurity and a lot of anger at the system. There was also a crisis for capitalism in the form of a threat from the left, the Russian Revolution. It's also a period when women were gaining more rights. So this challenged the status of men and the patriarchy. And so those, you know, uncertain social conditions created the cauldron out of which fascism emerged. So our crises today aren't exactly the same, but there's something analogous going on. We're in a period of extreme economic uncertainty. There are ecological challenges that are new and very dangerous. And there have been some modest threats from the left. Not enough, in our opinion, as long time organizers and people who want a more egalitarian world, but enough that it scared the elites and caused them to think about how to respond. And their response is essentially to choose fascism over fairness, to try to take that insecurity and that rage and that questioning of the system and redirect it towards vulnerable scapegoats, instead of allowing it to be directed upwards at them, at the oligarchs.

SPEAKER_2 (4:08)

Do you think that self-policing is enough, Gario? Any head of you? Hold it.

Naomi Klein (4:11)

Hold it. I mean, I think that the rise of democratic socialism and the not complete successes, but certainly near successes of figures like Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who will talk about every billionaire being a policy failure, calls to tax billionaires. I mean, these all seem like not nearly enough to us. But one of the things that we have found in our research is that fascism is a pathology of the injured strong, people who had status and then feel that they are losing it. And that sense of injury is relative. It doesn't mean that you are the most injured person in a society. In fact, fascists in societies tend to be relatively strong within their particular class groups, right? They are the men, tends to be a very male-led movement. And they're men who are losing relative power and feel that masculinity is injured. Or they may be industrialists who feel humiliated and punished by economic sanctions, in the case of German industry. So injury is relative. That sense of injury is not about being the most downtrodden. And what we have found, like I think we need to think about our billionaire class and increasingly trillionaire, potentially class.