Fascism's False Promise of Revolution

This is the fourth in a series analyzing The Anatomy of Fascism. Click here to read Part One. Click here for Part Two. Click here for Part Three.

The young man sat across from me at a family dinner in October 2016, confirming his revolutionary bona fides by pledging to vote for either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. 

He was a family friend who had talked to me about men’s rights and capitalist exploitation and race science and labor rights – a strange brew of far right and leftist politics that left me stumped in trying to reach this young guy before he helped elect Trump to the highest office in the land. 

“I just want to shove dynamite up the ass of the system,” he told me that day over steak and potatoes. “I don’t care what happens from there.” 

You will care, I told him, when the disorder that flows from an exploded system comes for you and your friends and family in ways you could have never imagined. Though we are financially comfortable in our sanitized suburban lives, we won’t be immune from the horrors and shocks inherent in the collapse of our democratic republic. 

“We need revolution,” the young man said, pleading with me to join the cause and cast a vote for the fascist or the left-wing spoiler who had given a full throated endorsement of Hillary Clinton in the months leading up to the 2016 election, unlike she had done with Barack Obama in 2008. “Things can’t go on like this. We need to overturn the system.” 

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The worst part: I agreed with him. The system, in these final stages of capitalist evolution, had become so rotten, so corrupt, so filled with grime and dirt and festering, bulging maggots, that even normie voters were taking notice. All the pretense of a fair and livable society had fallen away in the 21st century, a natural progression of the reactionary Reagan Revolution, which marked the end of any attempt to reign in capitalist excess. Going into the 2016 election, there was a widespread sense that things could not possibly get worse. 

After talking up Trump and feigning interest in Bernie’s egalitarian economic policy preferences, the young man repeated a line that had become commonplace at fall 2016 Trump rallies in which the Republican candidate made a feigned last-minute appeal to voters of color in a naked attempt to provide moral cover for white folks hesitant to embrace an outright fascist presidential candidate: “What have you got to lose?” 

I pushed my steak and potatoes around my plate for a while before leaving the table. I was sick. I knew then that Trump would win. 

‘Group Destiny’: Not As Cool As It Sounds 

There has always been a revolutionary sheen to fascist movements, an energy that has excited (mostly) men overcome by the Leader’s talk of fucking over the power structure, the monied class, the ruling class, the flabby bourgeois scum who have danced on the bruised backs of those who trade their labor for a few bucks. The fascist Leader understands how to galvanize those teeming with grievance, those who define themselves by their victimhood. We will flip the hierarchies of power, the Leader pledges with all the gaudy aesthetics of a proper fascist movement. 

The revolution is here; you will be set free from those bourgeoisie. 

This pattern is discussed in agonizing and clarifying detail in Robert Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism, which seeks to define what exactly makes a fascist movement. The book draws on the only two successful fascist movements in recorded history: Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. In both cases, Dear Leader thrilled their early supporters – working class men who had fought in the First World War – with promises of revolution. The “deadlock or collapse of an existing liberal state,” Paxton writes, is the only known avenue to this revolutionary message taking hold in mass politics. Without the crisis that comes from a constitutional system in shambles, there are exceedingly few takers of this revolutionary cause. 

The revolution promised by the fascist Leader is not the one he delivers, however. 

The fascist call for revolution is, by default, in bad faith. The Leader knows as he calls for revolt that his rise to power will not lead to more just, safe, decent lives for working people desperate for a break. This was the precise call of the Leader’s socialist enemies: For a freer and fairer society in which everyone shares in the riches of the nation. Beating back those socialist movements is why the fascist Leader was allowed into the conservative power structure in the first place, for it was the Leader who pledged to the conservative establishment that he had the muscle and the know-how for crushing anyone and everyone who dared advocate for socialism or communism. Blocking a real revolution was the Leaders’ role all along. He was never going to deliver better lives for his faithful. Maybe those faithful knew as much; maybe they didn’t. Maybe they just wanted to bash some skulls. The bad-faith revolution is tragic in so many ways. 

Fascism’s false promise of revolution is closely tied to its obsession with “group destiny,” or the idea that certain nations or people are anointed by god (which god is hard to say) to triumph over its perceived enemies and rule the earth. This belief has been promoted in every dominant country on the planet, including the United States, where countless millions of religious folks believe in the their bones that God Almighty favors America and Americans, but only some, only the ones who vote Republican down ballot and go to church every Sunday and Wednesday and adorn their 2022 Ford F-150s with the bumper sticker of their local Christian music radio station and make a show on social media of not watching sports because pro athletes get vaccines or canceling their Disney-plus subscriptions because Dr. Who has “gone woke.” 

This, naturally, is another load of bad faith bullshit leveraged by fascist movements because when fascists say “group destiny,” they do not in any way mean the entire group. The American right – like all rightists – holds an inherent hatred of Americans. The God-blessed destiny of our people includes only a sliver of the population – good soldiers who will join the Leader’s cause in perpetuating the make-believe revolution so many desire. This is often referred to as fascists’ “privileged relationship with history.” It's proven a potent political and cultural fiction.

And if you’re wondering whether you’re part of the fascists’ “group destiny,” you most assuredly are not. They will show you as much, sooner or later.

Those with little (or none) have found a home in fascist movements over the generations because these movements are adept in exploiting misery and grievance and alienation with promises of glorious revenge on those who have made life so unbearable. Without any promise to more fairly distribute goods and resources, with no pledges to establish basic rights that would protect working people from the horrors of capitalist exploitation – so finely tuned in the 21st century – the Leader has offered nothing more than the aforementioned “revolution of the soul.” Such a revolution does not include any material gains, only cruelty and depravity and, yes, blood. The fascist idea of revolution appeals directly to the lizard brain, the animalistic part of us that hurdles toward oblivion after we’ve tricked ourselves into believing there is no point in striving for a better civilization. It’s when the best possible futures have evaporated in our minds that we become lemmings running headlong toward the cliff’s edge. When nihilism wins the day – as it did so tragically in 20th century fascist movements – death is the only outcome, both for the follower and those for whom he holds so much radiating hatred. 

All the “energy, unity, and willpower” of a successful fascist movement can never taper off or slow down if the movement is to continue making ground and establishing dominance, Paxton writes. 

"While any regime can radicalize,” Paxton writes, “the depth and force of the fascist impulse to unleash destructive violence, even to the point of self-destruction, sets it apart.” Fascist movements, he adds, are like speeding trains that one day run out of rail: They end in an “ecstasy of terminal destruction.”

“At the end, fanatical fascists prefer to destroy everything in a final paroxysm, even their own country, rather than admit defeat,” Paxton writes. 

There is, I think, a strange and somewhat perverse hope here, a flicker of light at the very end of a hellish tunnel. Perhaps America’s fascist movement will one day soon run out of train track and reach that final paroxysm. That hope has a pitch black shadow hanging over it: How many people will suffer or die or wish for death during and after this inevitable and terminal destruction? It's something I'd rather not think about, an intrusive thought to end all intrusive thoughts.

Fascism In the Age of Tear-It-Down Voters

A recent New York Times poll showing Donald Trump with an overwhelming advantage in every key state but one included data on the growing faction of what NYT data scientist Nate Cohn calls the “tear-it-down” voter. Almost 70 percent of “the country’s political and economic systems need major changes — or even to be torn down entirely,” Cohn wrote. 

It’s a stunning number, and one that should raise alarms among representatives on every level of government who would like to maintain some semblance of a functioning society. Seven in ten voters are sick of this shit and don’t care what happens as long as those in charge are replaced by someone – anyone who will make changes, any changes, the worst changes. It doesn’t matter. Nihilism has gripped the American electorate; the cliff’s edge looks as enticing as ever for most voters. 

Mr. Trump fares especially well among those who believe that the political and economic systems ought to be torn down, a group that represents about 15 percent of registered voters. He leads among these anti-system voters by 32 points, and the tear-it-down voters are especially likely to have defected from the president. In contrast, Mr. Biden retains nearly all of his 2020 supporters who believe only minor changes are necessary. These change voters are not necessarily demanding a more ideologically progressive agenda. In the last Times/Siena poll of the same states, 11 percent of registered voters thought that Mr. Biden was not progressive or liberal enough. And while many liberal or progressive voters want major changes, relatively few of those voters are defecting from Mr. Biden.

Of course the New York Times doesn’t define what “somewhat or very good” changes means to the people answering their polls. The 45 percent of voters who said Trump – who, by the way, has already served as president – would bring “good” change might very well believe good change includes concentration camps for migrants, prison for women who have miscarriages, a rolling back of all well-meaning climate policies, and nonstop show trials for enemies of the Leader. All we know is that the trials will be compelling and the ratings will be huge. 

We are now a decade into this Tear It Down Era. These voters gave it one last shot with Barack Obama – a president who pledged to change the system in so many vague ways – and have since given up. That we now have a Caretaker of Empire Party and an outright fascist party with no left alternative is extraordinarily bleak for the future of American democracy. I don’t know exactly what tear-it-down voters will do in 2024 or beyond, but I know they have no interest whatsoever in supporting the Caretaker Party. A politician like Joe Biden can hold things together for a while, but after that, I don’t know. The caretakers who come after Biden – Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Wes Moore, Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsome, Pete Buttigieg – will face an even more openly hostile electorate willing to give power to the fascists because it is only the fascists who are promising disruption. The grip of all-consuming nihilism is bound to get stronger in the coming years unless major structural change is made – something for which Democrats have shown no stomach.

It seemingly doesn’t matter if such disruption brings unrelenting misery to the friends and family members of the tear-it-down voters. They can sleep well knowing that the system has been torn down. 

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social and on Threads and X at @CDCarter13.