Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, authors of End Times Fascism
Recently I’ve been taking part in events in festivals and bookshops in towns across Britain, and I’ve noticed that something has genuinely shifted in the audiences I’m meeting. There is a growing hunger and impatience now everywhere not just to understand the crises that are rocking our world, but also to take action against them. The discussions circle constantly around the same words, as almost every question begins: “What can I do?”
What can I do about the far right, what can I do about online porn, what can I do about AI, what can I do for my daughter, what can I do for my son, what can I do about the climate emergency, what can I do, what can I do …
I try to answer those questions honestly, without false hope, sharing my belief that we can still make real changes that matter in our burning world. I know that everywhere more and more conversations are going on along the same lines. And what interests me is how much the answers in left or feminist or environmental circles seem to be converging, even when the explanations for the problem at hand are rather different.
I was particularly struck by this convergence as I was reading Naomi Klein’s and Astra Taylor’s new book, End Times Fascism. On the face of it, this book takes a different path to the one I take into the problems we are currently facing. Klein and Taylor flag up the apocalyptic beliefs of our overlords, focusing particularly on the American tech and political elite and their susceptibility to dreams of the “end times”.
By doing so, Klein and Taylor shine new light on the behaviour of these men, and the dangers they pose to people and the planet. They enable us to see that these men are not only careless people, but cruel people. They are destroying communities and ecosystems not just because those are collateral damage to their pursuit of profit, but because they genuinely believe that this world is ending and they want to hasten that end so that they can wing off into their new world – either through some crazy space adventure or some even crazier Christian-coded apocalyptic redemption.
That viewpoint gives clarity on some of the wildest excesses of these men. Reading how Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, has visited red cows kept in a settlement in the West Bank – not just any red cows, but those perfect heifers which are taken to presage the apocalypse in literal readings of the bible – gave me more context to his vitriolic response to Ed Miliband’s recent pragmatic step towards standing up to Israel’s crimes. If you have embraced the idea that the world is moving towards the end times and a promised redemption, you might well get a bit frustrated with politicians who would rather dial down the tension. Klein and Taylor also explore territory that is very familiar to me, which is the patriarchal nature of this new fascism. Everywhere in these circles we meet assaults on women’s dignity and freedoms. In my view, that misogyny – whether it’s seen in online abuse or the trafficking and abuse of women and girls offline, whether it’s railing against women being given the vote or stripping women of their reproductive rights – is the dark heart of the new authoritarianism.
People are joining movements that seek to go up against the worst excesses of our tech and political elites….. attempting to build alternatives
This deep misogyny is such an urgent issue to tackle, because while most followers of these powerful men won’t buy into or care much about the end-times aspect of their worldview, they absolutely do buy into their dehumanising view of women. That means that a culture is constantly being strengthened in which sexism and aggression against women are rewarded. Similarly, while evangelical Christianity only characterises a pocket of rising authoritarianism across the world, misogyny connects every patriarchy that is strengthening now, from the US to China, from Afghanistan to Russia.
But whether you are focusing on the misogyny of our new leaders or their apocalyptic rhetoric, or whether you focus on other aspects of the new authoritarianism, the question that still rises is one and the same:
What can I do? What can I do? What can I do?
And this is where I now see such striking convergence across so many places and people. Klein and Taylor call the answer Hereness. Other writers and activists are talking about being rooted, about place-based politics, about progressive localism, about new municipalism, about democratic confederalism. You can see it everywhere from anarchist groups’ revitalisation of mutual aid to Andy Burnham’s plans for devolution. It’s all about trying to ensure that decisions are taken by those closest to them, and that the multiple positive aspects of places and communities are celebrated and strengthened.
There are two key dangers in these near-at-hand ideas for progress. One is that they can sound much too weak and tentative to take on the huge power of the overlords. A very good reel from Dan Rosen that sparked an amused response from Naomi Klein herself nails this. Are reading groups going to cut it while the oligarchs are advancing killer robots and stripping women of the vote?
The other danger is that localism turns out to be not at all progressive, and that when decisions are devolved to communities, those communities turn out not to want the things that Klein and Taylor – or you and I – would like them to choose.
Those are key challenges, but I’m galvanised by the number of people who are, like Klein and Taylor, trying to figure out how to meet those challenges. Because wherever we are starting from, more and more of us are finding ourselves on the same paths, doing similar work, and trying to connect with others alongside us.
People are joining movements that seek to go up against the worst excesses of our tech and political elites, and at one and the same time they are attempting to build alternatives in their own places and communities. It’s fair to feel anxious that this renewed localism may not offer any straightforward solution to the crises around us. But it is also time to give it a go. As Klein and Taylor say so memorably: “What keeps these men up at night is … us. It’s the possibility that a popular and vigorous democratic movement will rise up and defend this planet and the many life-forms who call it home.”
Another way of putting it is that it’s time to shift that constant question, “what can I do?”, to “what can we do?” And what will we do, together?
Natasha Walter is an author and founder of Women for Refugee Women. Her most recent book, Feminism for a World on Fire, is published by Virago. You can buy it at the Nerve Bookshop at a discounted price.
End Times Fascism … and the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor is published by Allen Lane. It is also discounted at the Nerve Bookshop