Antifascism and the politics of meaning

Joan Braune, Understanding and Countering Fascist Movements: From void to hope, Routledge, London and New York NY, 2024, pp. xii and 143.

Reviewed by Mike Makin-Waite

This is committed scholarship, a book intended to help understand ‘contemporary fascist movements, particularly in the United States, in order to defeat them’. As ‘a philosophical contribution to antifascist theory and practice’, though, Braune’s book is no simplistic statement of position or listing of familiar slogans. She explores a range of complex and tricky problems with thought and care – and shows that there is no contradiction between such intellectual work and the requirements of activism.

Understanding and Countering Fascist Movements is a short book, and does not pretend to be comprehensive or to provide an overview of the wider literature or debates. Braune has chosen instead to write four detailed chapters considering aspects of the current impulses towards fascism, theoretical lenses through which to comprehend them, and a critical assessment of particular efforts to counter the rise of the far right, making this a stimulating and valuable read. Braune also provides an introduction and conclusion arguing that the potential for fascism is not a danger which has somehow just come up alongside our current economic and political system, or in spite of it, but from it and because of it.

One of Braune’s key insights is that, amongst many other things, fascism is ‘a false solution to a quest for meaning’, a movement which plays ‘upon deep human desires’ and ‘promises to fill profound voids [of meaning] … but the promise it offers proves false. We must understand the nature and content of this promise if we wish to effectively counteract its pull’.

She suggests that effective responses will combine two forms of understanding which, if not used together, can lead to one-sidedness: ‘a perspective that sees fascism solely as a social movement to be outnumbered and crushed in the street may fail to understand how the psychological appeal of fascist movements arises (under certain social conditions) and may also be lacking in certain types of knowledge that could help to prevent and counter recruitment’. On the other hand, focussing ‘exclusively on the individualised psychological dimension … tends to miss the ways in which fascism is always already partly normal, resting on structures, systems and normalisation of racism in society, as well as capitalism and other systems of oppression …’. In line with her theme that is current social arrangements which generate the fascist possibility, rather than this being an exogenous threat, Braune points out that ‘too much emphasis on fascism as “extreme” or on fascists as traumatised and lonely can make us look for it in the wrong places and miss it when it shows up with greater adjacency to power’.

The book’s first chapter considers the psychological appeals of fascism with reference to the work of Erich Fromm (1900-1980) and Simone Weil (1909-1943), thinkers who separately identified ‘the role of “idolatry” or “ideology” in filling personal voids with a temporary, unstable sense of personal identity and purpose’ which ‘is then defended and enforced with increasing levels of destructiveness and violence’.

Braune describes how recruits to fascism do not accurately identify or confront the real causes of the ‘voids of meaning’ which they face. Instead, they blame ‘a scapegoated “other”’, people who have ‘“taken” the meaning that ought to be present and has caused this gaping absence of wholeness’ (and these ‘others’ are then cast as less-than-people so as to ‘justify’ the antipathy and violence which is directed towards them). In this context, ‘destructiveness’ can become ‘a way of “compensating” for the void’ (this is one of Weil’s insights), as it both arises from and serves as a defence against ‘feelings of powerlessness, fear (“feeling threatened by the world outside”), and the stifling of life opportunities or potential’ (Fromm).

It is a challenge to summarise the thinking of such complex thinkers as Fromm and Weil, each of whom changed some of their key beliefs over time, and tended in their later writings towards what this reviewer sees as unfortunate mystifications, but Braune effectively draws out key points which relate to her concerns, looking at how ‘the triad of void, idol and destructiveness plays out in recent and contemporary fascist movements’. She notes how ‘the adoption of far-right, fascist or white nationalist politics’ is often presented as ‘meaning-giving to the depressed individual for whom all else is meaningless’.

Braune’s second chapter explores the role of myths of destruction and rebirth in fascism. Many of the movement’s ideologues encourage their followers to see themselves as ‘the protagonist in the “turning” or a foreordained historical or natural cycle’, as someone ‘foreordained to burn the world and erect a new one from the ashes’. Members of fascist movements are offered ways to channel what the (antifascist) Austrian novelist Robert Musil identified as ‘the explosive inner force that lies behind wars … the apparently human need to rip existence to shreds from time to time and toss them to the winds, seeing where they fall. In peacetime, this craving for a “metaphysical bang”, if I may call it that, piles up as a residue of discontent’.

Braune confirms that the fascistic so-called ‘vision’ can be described as ‘“accelerationist” in the sense of trying to speed up this cycle of destruction and rebirth through acting to deliberately worsen current conditions’. But she cautions against too broad a use of the term, which she sees as being misapplied by some in the counterterrorism field, where it is conflated with any and all proposals that things should ‘be dramatically otherwise, very soon’. In line with her left-wing and progressive politics, Braune argues that ‘accelerationism’s catastrophic vision’, which she considers in terms of how it is expressed through a range of reactionary writers, opinion-formers and movements, ‘must be differentiated from other revolutionary or aggressive impulses with different aims and values’. Drawing again from Fromm, who distinguished between ‘“catastrophic” and “prophetic” messianisms’, she shows that ‘yearning for total transformation takes multiple forms’. Whereas left-wing visions of fundamental change are hopeful and life-affirming, Braune shows that fascists more-or-less consciously believe ‘that the inherent injustice of the world cannot be defeated, only embraced’ (in this, she confirms and updates insights of ‘Frankfurt School’ theorists, Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman in their 1949 book Prophets of Deceit).

Braune closes chapter two by describing how some fascist writers, including the Italian occultist and ‘traditionalist’ Julius Evola, ‘appropriated the concept of the Kali-yuga from Hinduism to describe their vision of the complete “degeneracy” of present society and their expectation of a coming mythic leader who would destroy and reset the world’. This sets the scene for her third chapter, a sharp and worrying assessment of Steve Bannon, the strategist, communicator and alliance-builder who was the pre-eminent official advisor to Trump for the first eight months of his 2016-2020 presidential term. This period showed ‘that a politics of destructive accelerationism is not merely a fringe criminal phenomenon … rather, apocalyptic visions of destruction and rebirth also show up at centres of power’. The fact that, at the time of writing this review, Bannon has begun serving a short prison sentence in Connecticut for not complying with subpoenas issued by the House Select Committee that investigated the events on the Capitol of January 6, 2022, most likely marks only a very temporary pause in his recurrent ‘reactionary scheming’.

In her final chapter, Braune critiques officially sanctioned ‘counter-extremism’ and ‘deradicalisation’ programmes, including ones which use the stories of ‘formers’ (people who have left far-right movements). This reviewer found her arguments particularly thought-provoking, as he has helped to run a number of such programmes over recent years and – in spite of the many objections which can be made to them – found this a positive and useful thing to do.

Detailing the ‘objections’, Braune points out that ‘deradicalisation’ initiatives ‘tend to frame the problem of being one of “polarisation” and “extremism”’, wrongly suggesting ‘that centrism and the status quo are the site of safety and the source of the solution to fascist violence’.

Though this is correct, it is appropriate to make distinctions between different kinds of curriculum materials, and styles of facilitation: my experience is that, even with material which is shaped by liberal assumptions, the programmes can generate a great deal of positive commitment and critical thinking – including about social structures. Braune does note that ‘some insights’ which come from ‘centrist counter-extremism … can still be applied in left, antifascist struggle’, and confirms that ‘there is a place for work by those with appropriate skill sets in disengaging fascists from their movements and ideology’.

Braune is also correct to counsel against ‘a problematic “compassion narrative” that claims fascists can be deradicalised through kind outreach from members of targeted groups’, or, indeed, from well-meaning liberals. It should certainly not be expected of the victims of fascist antipathy or violence that they take on the task of ‘converting’ hard-core far-right activists. But surely this is an argument for a properly thought-through application of contact theory, rather than a rejection in principle of the work of engaging with ‘ordinary’ supporters of far-right, populist and even fascist movements, an approach which can be more effective in working for positive politics than one of ‘othering’ them. Practice based on contact theory needs to be well-prepared and carried out professionally rather than simplistically: since the time that Erving Goffman wrote on these issues, it’s been understood that ‘familiarity ‘need not reduce contempt’. In sharply contested situations, and where the necessary conditions are not in place, contact can do more harm than good, actually serving to foster opposition, enmity and aggression than positive relations.

Braune’s remarkable observation that she sometimes feels that, in her ‘public and community educational work against hate groups’, she spends ‘a good 80% of the time convincing well-meaning white liberals not to go have a beer with the Proud Boys to overcome “polarisation” or “iron out their differences”’, indicates a sense (borne of frustration) on the part of many people in her networks that, somehow, ways need to be found to transform situations and relationships which have become increasingly toxic. If ‘contact’ initiatives are going to play a part in such transformation, one set of differences which will need ‘ironing out’ is amongst anti-racists and anti-fascists themselves, for many people with these commitments are opposed in principle to engagement with ‘the other’. Perhaps such a stance is plausible when far-right activists are a tiny minority, shunned as eccentrics by the majority of people, with those who opt for violence as a tactic effectively criminalised by the authorities. But what about when far-right themes are animating the most popular political organisation in a country like France, or when the Proud Boys can optimistically expect that their hero will again be elected president by tens of millions of Americans? Perhaps, by then, the time for engagement and dialogue is overdue, and should have been done long ago?

The difficulties involved in taking effective steps to counter the threat of fascism, on the basis of an understanding that ‘neoliberal power structures’ must not be let ‘off the hook’ as the source of this danger, relate to a wider disagreement over strategy which has long riven the left. This relates to the issue of alliances between those left-wingers who see the need to recast and transform current social relations, and ‘mainstream’ centrists who express concern about some of the consequences and symptoms of current social relations but who, at the end of the day, want to defend, retain and ‘improve’ existing arrangements and systems. More and more, the coherence and vitality of the right is ‘forcing’ a coming together of these left and centrist forces, if only in temporary, ill-thought through, contingent and unstable forms, as seen this month in relation to electoral considerations in France, where communists and Macron supporters have negotiated together so as to avoid competing for votes against Le Pen, and in the USA where Sanders and AOC have rallied behind Biden. How does the importance of promoting the well-defined and principled radical lines relate offered by Braune relate to the sense that, as she says, ‘we are … in an “all hands on deck” situation in the United States – anti-capitalism or a leftist identity is not a prerequisite for participating in work against fascism and hate’?

Such debates about how to counter the far-right are unfortunately becoming ever more urgent. Braune’s contributions are an important focus for the discussions and steps that we will hopefully take so as to put in place effective strategies to address the roots of the divisive, counter-productive and dangerous politics of our time.

Published July 2024.

Illustration. On 6 January 2022, supporters of Donald Trump breached the Capitol building, after the 45^th President urged them to protest against the ceremonial counting of the electoral votes confirming Joe Biden’s election as 46^th President. Four people died as a result of the day’s violence.