Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Bring back toxic lead!!
I haven’t read it yet, but End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor seems both interesting and highly relevant. Here are some of the main points from what I have gathered so far:
• What the authors call “End Times Fascism” consists of 3 main strands (all part of the MAGA coalition): the Christian Right, the tech oligarchs, and the white supremacists.
• The Christian Right are longing for the apocalypse, and actively seeking to bring it about, because they see it as the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy and the precursor to Jesus’ long awaited return.
• The tech oligarchs, many of them deeply influenced by trans-humanist philosophy, are hoping to make an obscene profit from devouring the Earth’s last resources and think they personally can escape the resulting mass-extinction by going for the Dr. Strangelove solution, colonizing Mars, uploading their souls to the cloud etc.
• The white supremacists are longing for a cataclysm that will purge the Earth of undesirables and hope to emerge from the resulting carnage as the planet’s undisputed rulers.
• Like the older forms of fascism, this latest iteration is a reaction to a perceived threat to the power and status of the dominant, but whereas the old fascists all had their own versions of “Der Untermensch”, the End Times Fascists see humanity itself as the inferior race, to be replaced by AI, cyborgs, disembodied ghosts living in the cloud etc.
• Since what these people are advocating is not in most people’s best interest, they needed an authoritarian leader prepared to push their agenda through by force and found it in Donald Trump.
As the authors point out, it’s easy to dismiss these ideas as silly, and indeed they are. Yet the fact of the matter is that they are now enormously influential at the highest levels of the American government. As both the older forms of fascism and the MAGA movement itself have demonstrated all too clearly, an idea doesn’t have to be intellectually respectable to be consequential, and the potential for self-fulfilling prophecies is only too obvious.
Seems worth a read.
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