The term “fascism” is often loosely thrown about, an error which the authors of End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World are determined to sidestep right from the beginning. They lay out a definition courtesy of historian Robert Paxton: Fascism is a “form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood . . . in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants . . . abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” That’s a mouthful, certainly, but it’s the key starting point for the rest of the book.
Authors Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor are formidably positioned to undertake the effort of untangling what fascism looks like in contemporary practice, with the former having won the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction with 2023’s Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, and the latter having penned The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart.
They suggest that fascism is underway to differing degrees in a number of countries, including the United States. What makes these versions of fascism different from those practiced by Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain or Duterte in the Philippines is that today’s overlords “foresee an apocalyptic future in which roiling chaos and carnage are the norm,” Klein and Taylor write. “A world where pandemics, climate emergencies, resource wars, and rogue tech are routine, and politics stirs the pot.”
Klein and Astra single out instigators such as tech bros whose pursuit of profit overrides climate, privacy and economic concerns in the wake of the artificial intelligence boom; ethno-nationalists intent on “purifying” their culture; religious extremists willing to foment chaos in pursuit of hastening the apocalypse; and unrestrained corporate plutocrats who either ignore or accelerate what the authors perceive as devastating climate change. Some of these agents of change believe they can escape to space or to earthbound bunkers, some visualize a more imminent transit to a wondrous afterlife, some nihilistically intend to maximize their present wealth and power, knowing they won’t be alive to face the consequences.
While the authors paint a somewhat dispiriting picture of our present, they also provide examples of pockets of resistance working to decentralize power and wealth and provide for a future that benefits more than just the 1%. Unlike many contemporary polemicists, Klein and Taylor document their work with extensive endnotes that permit their readers to investigate their exhaustive research and draw their own conclusions. Penetrating and sobering, End Times Fascism is sure to cause a stir—and that’s the point.