This is the last book that I grabbed from Verso recently in a book buying binge, and I was quite excited about it. Reading it was still super interesting, but the audience is clearly an academic one and the book gets very bogged down in academic lingo and such. To be clear, I don't think that's the fault of Toscano or anything like that, I just am not the intended audience and was hoping for the book to be something different. But it would be so cool if a version of this was written for a more general audience.
The book uses writings about fascism throughout history to look at our contemporary US society and make comparisons. It's really interesting as it pulls from a broad pool of work encompassing Germany and Italy (of course) as well as Black radical writings talking about how the US has always been fascist to people of color. I found it really interesting how he talks about fascism and time, while many people regard fascism to be an obsession with the past, he characterizes it more as an obsession with the future which is how they can make changes so quickly. A similar twist is done with fascism and freedom where fascists don't shut up about freedom and liberty but it's specifically freedom to exploit other people, which then leads directly into how fascism and capitalism are directly intertwined. Capitalists need the freedom to do a capitalism. The book ends with a chapter that was probably the most new to me but there's this eroticism of fascism where fascists are seen as super sexy and seductive, like a bad boy aesthetic, when they were all known to be, just, gross. I hadn't thought of that aspect too much previously.
Now I'm sure there was plenty in the book that went over my head, I was familiar with most of the writers that are cited but I don't know them in depth. But Even I found that slogging through it I was able to pick up on and think about a number of ideas. Fascism just seems like an ever-more slippery concept to me with people crying that the current regime is fascism or isn't fascist and things like that. For me personally, I side with the fact that this is fascism but I have heard a compelling argument that fascism was a specific movement situated in a specific time in Italy/Germany around WWII and I do find that an interesting idea. Toscano does complicate that by pulling in writings from other cultures on fascism which I think makes this work much more compelling. Because the US and imperial regimes have always had an element of fascism, especially for people of color, and that is highlighted in this work. In most discussions I usually see that overlooked.
The last chapter on eroticism really made me think though about how fascists did win the aesthetics war. There's such a clear set of imagery and look to fascism, it's all black and red and angular, it's not hard to find it a little appealing. And it wasn't even the right being the only people promoting it, the fact that most people just equate Hitler with evil because we make these simplistic comparisons in decades of art comes from all corners! It's just bizarre! Meanwhile leftists are demonized by Democrats and Republicans alike (just look at the NYC mayoral primary, people are being super racist there). There isn't a set of aesthetics to fall back on and promote, which means that it doesn't spread as far without a ton of effort.
I found this to be a provoking read, and I might come back to it later to see if I can gleam more from the content. But if you don't want to go through an academic text, feel free to skip this, just do some reading on the history of fascism. Eventually I hope these ideas will make their way into a more accessible format, but we will have to wait on that.
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