Fascism Archives - Page 5 of 10

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Antifa vs. Nazis: Where Has All The Violence Gone?

Despite warnings of precipitating a nascent civil war, antifascist violence has ended with the retreat of the far right

June 21, 2018 • by Mike Isaacson

Another weekend has passed with a little noted gathering of fascists away from public view and with minimal confrontation between them and antifa. On a small peninsula in Montgomery Bell Park in Tennessee, two white nationalist organizations: the American Freedom Party and the Council of Conservative Citizens, held a joint conference. Like many ...

Antifa vs. Nazis: Where Has All The Violence Gone?

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The Radical Center and The Politics of the Gray

Notes on the implications of the social condition for an understanding of politics

March 30, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Over the past three months, I have been publishing weekly Gray Friday posts, reflecting on the events of the day and enduring human problems, and considering how contributions to Public Seminar inform my appreciation of the beauty of the gray. Today, I will begin to explain the political implications I ...

The Radical Center and The Politics of the Gray

Blue Monday

Brown and Blue

Further thoughts on gun violence, fascism, and resistance

February 26, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington I’m still moanin’ about the high school massacre in Parkdale, Florida. Moaning, and thinking. About guns, and politics, and history. The massacre was horrendous, but also distinctively compelling, insofar as the extraordinary response of the Marjory Stoneman ...

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Eminem vs. Trump

The political importance of the artist

February 18, 2018 • by Lisa Aslanian

I was in Chicago with my son, visiting colleges, and he was listening to the new Eminem album while he was working out in the hotel gym. He told me that he thought the album was great, but that he was not sure if he agreed with Eminem using his ...

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Neither Normalization Nor Alarmism

Responding to Ivan Krastev

December 6, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Krastev is surely right that the current situation is distinctive (indeed all situations are distinctive), and simplistic analogies to 1930’s fascism or 1970’s communism are misleading. He is also right that “alarmism” is mistaken (after all, when is “alarmism,” as opposed to “sounding the alarm,” ever a good thing?), and that the defense of democracy ...

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Jeffrey C. Isaac, John McCain and Me

Thinking about a Democratic Antifa

October 27, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Isaac documents the danger that is White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. General Kelley’s disciplined authoritarianism may be more “adult” than that of his boss. Yet, as Isaac observes, it is enabling and not controlling the threat Trump presents to American democracy. Analyzing the interactive context of Trump’s telephone conversation with ...

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Adorno with Freud, Adorno Beyond Freud

Part 4

October 19, 2017 • by Chiara Bottici

“Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda” is a strange text. It presents itself as a dynamic interpretation of Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, which, in its turn is, also, according to Adorno, a “dynamic interpretation” of Le Bon’s description of the mass mind.[1] It ...

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Subverting the Symbols of White Supremacy

The wolf and the fox

October 17, 2017 • by Keval Bhatt

Fascism had always seemed to me a thing of the past. It was almost like a fairy-tale I was told -- a passive deterrent, an unreal warning -- while going through school. But school was not my education; my real education occurred as I entered the fight against fascism in ...

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How We Got Here

Transition failures, their causes, and the populist interest in the constitution

October 11, 2017 • by Andrew Arato

The answers to these questions are related. In the following, in the form of six theses, I start with what I mean by “populism”. Next, I wish to point to the two deficits of liberal democracy that provide the context for the rise of populist politics. These deficits have been ...

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Reading Adorno on Fascism in the Age of Trump

A New School roundtable

October 7, 2017 • by Lucas Ballestín

In an era marked by the rise of a paradoxically international right-wing populism, and in the midst of ethno-nationalist tumult in the United States, this roundtable reflects on the legacy and contemporary utility of “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda.” Might Freud and other psychoanalytic theorists still have something ...

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Adorno’s Uncanny Analysis of Trump’s Authoritarian Personality

Part 2

October 5, 2017 • by Jay M. Bernstein

During the election, Trump bragged that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” (January 23, 2016). In claiming this, Trump understood something about the social-psychological bond between his core supporters and himself that his critics have noted but largely ...

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Freudian Theory and The Pattern of Fascist Propaganda

Part 3

October 5, 2017 • by Jamieson Webster

Adorno is quick to pick up what I think of as the central theme for my remarks and touches on a great deal of what I have worked on in Freud and Lacan, namely on the question of love and family. Adorno says that Freud’s article is prophetic probably because ...